British PM Sunak gets reality checks on poll pull, Brexit

Doing a U-turn in politics is no longer news; ethics is usually for the birds in the cut-and-thrust of politics. Politicians making outlandish promises or not keeping those that helped them win power may no longer spring surprises in many locations, but they still raise hackles in Britain.

It was just the other day last summer when Rishi Sunak was bidding to be prime minister. He uploaded a slick video, promising to feed thousands of pages of EU legislation to the shredder. The video concluded with the words: ‘Keep Brexit safe. Vote Rishi Sunak today’. It was intended to burnish his Brexit credentials, to scrap EU laws long incorporated into UK law, as part of the promise of ‘taking back control’ from Brussels. A bill was also moved to set the expiry date of December 2023 (called the sunset clause) for EU laws to cease to apply in the UK; the plan was dubbed a post-Brexit bonfire of EU laws.

Last week, that promise collided with reality and his government abandoned that pledge. The fact is that over decades of EU membership, rules and regulations drawn up in Brussels have been applied in the UK across every aspect of life. Dis-applying them will create a new host of problems, besides the prospect of important laws falling away by accident. As business secretary Keri Badenoch now puts it, “Getting rid of EU law in the UK should be about more than a race to a deadline”. The climbdown was seen by some as another example of Sunak choosing pragmatism over tall Brexit claims.

The bill, expected to return to Parliament this week, is now to be amended. Officials in Whitehall who have been reviewing laws have so far identified nearly 5,000 pieces of legislation of EU origin. This new position soon invited ridicule and worse from inside and outside the ruling Conservative party: leading Tory Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg called it an “admission of administrative failure”, while those who long opposed the move to ditch EU laws called it a “humiliating U-turn” (Labour). The anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats said the Conservatives had “dug themselves into a hole” with the bill and that “while they may have stopped digging, they’re still in the hole”.

As columnist Andrew Rawnsley wrote in The Guardian: “We now have evidence from ‘real votes in real ballot boxes’ to tell us what the country thinks. And the answer is that voters are not swallowing Mr Sunak’s sales pitch. They are not buying it in places with marginal seats that will be critical to the outcome of the next general election, and they are rejecting it even in parts of England that have historically been deep blue. The local elections were his first electoral test since he moved into Downing Street six months ago and they confirm that a change of face at Number 10 has not assuaged the anger that people feel towards the Conservatives…The loss of more than 1,000 of their councillors was worse than their worst-case scenario”.