UK leadership candidate Truss pledges to ditch all EU laws by 2023

She says that those regulations hinder businesses

By Reuters

Published: Sat 23 Jul 2022, 8:30 AM

Last updated: Sat 23 Jul 2022, 10:34 PM

Liz Truss, the leading candidate to succeed Boris Johnson as the next prime minister of the UK, promised to scrap all remaining European Union laws that still apply in Britain, by 2023, if she wins the Conservative Party leadership contest, a Reuters report said.

Truss, who is currently the Foreign Secretary, has been up against former Finance Minister Rishi Sunak, in a race to court the 200,000 members of the Conservative Party who, over the course of the summer, will vote to choose the country's new prime minister.

Britain's relationship with Europe remains of great concern to the Conservative Party membership, generally characterised as more eurosceptic than the wider population.

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Although Truss campaigned for 'remain' in the 2016 referendum, she is now seen as the heir to Johnson's pro-Brexit position. Hoping to tap into the Conservative Party's Brexit concerns, she promised to purge all remaining EU laws from the statute books.

To avoid uncertainty and confusion as Britain untangled itself from the EU after 40 years of membership, the government automatically carried over thousands of EU laws and regulations into British law so that they would still apply after Brexit.

"EU regulations hinder our businesses and this has to change," said Truss in a statement. She also added that she was setting out her credentials as the "Brexit delivery" prime minister:

"In Downing Street, I will seize the chance to diverge from outdated EU law and frameworks and capitalise on the opportunities we have ahead of us."

The government had already set out its intention to replace/repeal existing EU laws but had not set a timeframe.

Truss' deadline of 2023 is earlier than a similar pledge made by Sunak, who campaigned for Brexit in 2016 but had been vilified by some sections of the Conservative Party for raising taxes to their highest level in decades.

Sunak said EU law would either be scrapped, or reformed, by the next election, which is expected in 2024. Truss currently has the upper hand over Sunak by 62% to 38% among Conservative Party members, according to a YouGov poll on Thursday.

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