Hollowed out government

Over the 43 long years of our membership of the EEC which  morphed into the EU government has become progressively enfeebled. More and more of our laws and standards are laid down by Brussels. The UK civil service has ben used to receiving its legislative instructions from a foreign power, and has settled down to accepting a large amount of derived law.

It is one of the reasons why people have become more dismissive of Westminster and Whitehall. We have had two governments for the price of three.

Some of it has added complexity and work we did not need. Some of it has produced rules and requirements that we accept or may have invented for ourselves.  The employment rules where the UK had a good record before membership of progressively raising standards for employees by UK legislative action has produced a body of minimum standards laws at EU level. The labour movement likes  these, which any UK government will keep. The Leave campaign recommended keeping them. Environmental laws are also examples of requirements which previous UK governments often wanted, though here we may wish to adapt them more to our national needs.

I have found an increasing number of areas where constituents have written to complain about the way something works where I have had to explain that Westminster did not have the power to alter it owing to EU demands. In such cases people did not readily gravitate to one of their MEPs, sensing that the European Parliament does not have the same power to initiate, revise  and repeal EU laws that the UK Parliament has over UK laws. It is also obvious that any individual MEP has so much less power to initiate and influence EU law than any UK MP has over UK law.

EU law is another kind of rule by experts, where the consultants and large company lobbyists and executives have the power to influence and draft for Brussels. The combination of too much big company government from the continent and too much independent quango government  from home, has created a new priesthood or tyranny by experts which the public decisively rejected on June 23rd.