The Brexit Freedoms Bill is announced but not yet published so we don’t exactly know what will be in it but it is one to watch (with one’s fingers crossed).
In her Telegraph article the Attorney General tries to persuade us that EU laws were undemocratic despite the fact that we voted to join the EU, elected MEPs to its parliament and all member states had considerable power to influence EU laws and even more so in their detailed implementation in-country. It’s a false argument to my mind, but now that we have voted ourselves out of the EU we have the power to ditch any of these pesky regulations and the Brexit Freedoms Bill will be one of the ways that happens.
Suella Braverman’s article is entirely non-specific about what needs to change and so speculation is free but it seems that genetic modification of crops is one area in the frame. As someone who was involved in successfully highlighting the environmental dangers of GM crops 20 years ago I am very relieved that we haven’t had herbicide-tolerant, that would be glyphosate-tolerant, oilseed rape and sugar beet in our fields for the past two decades. These days we would be considerably more nervous of the increased glyphosate use on human health grounds than back then, but the environmental consequences of more glyphosate in our lives would be worrying enough. Watch this area closely. Will the Environment Act (for England) with its objective of stopping and reversing the decline of wildlife by 2030 be an aid to restraining the removal of environmental protection or not?
But it is the manner in which many of the changes to existing regulations will be made that is almost as worrying as what the changes will be, and since we don’t really know what the changes will be we can first look at how they will be brought in. Almost five decades of EU-derived regulations is a big pile of stuff, and without the Brexit Freedoms Bill it would take a lot of legislative time, and scrutiny, to change things. This government is, somewhat understandably, impatient to get on with it, and so this bill will rely on and enable the use of Henry VIII powers which will greatly reduce parliamentary scrutiny of impacts. We may see a mad rush of slash and burn of regulations throughout our lives over a short period of time. If so, then environmental regulations, and particularly widlife ones, will be low down the pecking order of parliamentary and media attention. Reducing protection for birds of prey won’t compete well with reducing protection for workers’ rights in public debate.
Call me a pessimist if you like, but the trajectory of post-Brexit deregulation still sends shivers down my spine. Protection for species, habitats and sites are all at risk of weakening. And it’s not as though we are all currently and confidently looking forward to a wildlife-rich English countryside thanks to our leaving the Common Agricultural Policy is it? The hope was that Brexit wouldn’t happen, but that if it did agriculture policy would be improved and environmental protection would be retained. I’ve always felt that a more likely outcome would be that agriculture policy would be changed but hardly for the better in practice, and that environmental protection would be reduced through numerous changes. That’s still my prognosis.
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Unfortunately this is what people voted for (and why I voted to remain). Brexit only makes sense if you want to get rid of pesky European regulations. We have to trade with someone and if not the EU, then someone else. The US and others, which means accepting and competing with their sometimes lesser regulations. There is a real Brexit vision and it is competition in a global trading environment and removing anything that inhibits that. The Australian trade deal is the Brexiteers dream. Brexit had a lot of small print and it is too late for voters to read it now unfortunately we are just bystanders in what looks like being a car crash.
You’re a pessimist sir. Ah, thank you, I feel better for that, at least that makes two of us. While this government has such a large majority, it will wreck what it can while it can. With people worried about the rising cost of just staying warm, fed and housed, who is there to care about what happens in the countryside.
Today, Make Votes Matter are running a series of protests/demonstrations around the country to promote a fairer, more inclusive society via Proportional Representation. Sadly it wouldn’t be very green of me to travel to my closest one, but if you live in a big city and can add you weight to the numbers then please do so. What a huge difference PR would have made to the last election.
If you are not interested in some form of PR, then you have Belarus for company.
I am more concerned about the societal human health implications of rapeseed oil and sugar consumption than I am about traces of glyphosate being found everywhere anyone looks for them. Maybe we should look more critically at why we grow things rather than how we do it.
Oilseed rape took off in the mid-70s when the EEC decreed more self-sufficiency in edible oils to be a Good Thing, and Napoleon said the same about sugar from beet as cane sugar was getting difficult to source because his navy wasn’t all that good.
Both crops have undergone a lot of non-GM tinkering and we now have low-glucosinolate, low-erucic acid, low-tannin OSR with short straw and monogerm triploid hybrid SB that satisfy desirable agronomic and economic criteria. The edible oils and sugar produced from them support vast industries beyond the farm gate that profit from making us unhealthy. John Yudkin wrote about this in the 1970s but he was cancelled – by the low-fattists in the Church of Ancel Keys.
Here we are in the 2020s living with pandemics of non-infectious chronic diseases yet growing crops which have become dependent on prophylactic chemical treatments, require hugely complicated post- harvest processing and in the case of sugar beet, great caution to avoid compacting and eroding soils severely – to produce non-essential edible commodities which degrade our health and have no other utility except to keep the Money-Go-Round in perpetual motion.
If these crops were to disappear, no/low-till combinables would still be reliant on glyphosate as a tool – but it would be a start.
Not just oilseed rape but soya. Rape production we can control, soya not, unless we stop buying the blasted stuff. A pointless plant that we did without for centuries quite happily.
By the way I voted to remain for only one reason, being old, I see it as one of the greatest peace deals since NATO but nobody seems to recognise it. The pointless EU legislative bandwagon seems to have subsumed this and drove Brexit.
The Tories are always “Freedom for me, but not for thee” even at the best of times. This current lot make the South Seas Bubble guys look like amateurs in the corruption department. I doubt we’ll see anything that makes things better for anyone except the landed rich.
Braverman argues that EU regulations are undemocratic and I would agree with your assessment that this is a false argument. It is also the case that the present government has proven itself to be extremely undemocratic (or anti-democratic) in its efforts to assert its will and its attempts to modify electoral law to its own benefit (e.g. photo ID for voting, placing the Electoral Commission under ministerial control, seeking to give minister executive powers to overturn court rulings they don’t like, etc). It seems highly probable to me that we will see huge amounts of regulatory change with minimal parliamentary scrutiny and covering issues that were not ever debated as part of the Brexit referendum campaign and about which ‘the will of the people’ is anyone’s guess. I fear much of this change is likely to weaken protection for the environment as well as weakening other important areas of regulation such as employees rights, health and safety and consumer rights.