Before you’re impressed by this, worth noting that well over 60% of our wine comes from the EU, and that as an EU member and as a temporary measure since, this red tape did not/doesn’t at the moment apply to imports from there. gov.uk/government/new…
Much of this is therefore not so much “saved” as “additional Brexit burden avoided”. (More knowledgeable heads than mine can tell you about any safety implications.)
I have to say that I think that this …
… raises issues under the Government Communications Code.
What to do about a Prime Minister who persistently says things to Parliament that aren’t true? fullfact.org/news/dawn-butl…
One lesson from civil trial advocacy is that it’s generally not worth getting into a debate about whether someone is lying (deliberate dishonesty): that is hard to prove, and what matters is whether they say things that are incorrect.
So I think the discipline of not throwing around accusations of lying is generally a good one: the focus should be on the error rather than the state of mind of the maker of the statement.
On @Dominic2306’s “it worked” claim on the Internal Market Bill threat to breach the NI Protocol: remember that the heart of that “threat” related to State aid (Article 10). What did the “threat” achieve? A declaration worth more or less nothing. See eurelationslaw.com/blog/the-case-…
NB too that the House of Lords refusal to agree the “threat” - which it was pretty obviously going to do, given the blatant breach of promise - meant that the “threat”
was always a paper tiger. Main effect was to further damage the current UK govt’s credibility.
Which makes it even more difficult to get changes in the Protocol or easements within it.
The point is - as I suspect @Dominic2306 well knows - that large parts of the NIP are opaque in the sense that the casual/lazy reader won’t work out what is going on. But they are *not* opaque in the key sense i.e. that there is any legal doubt about what they mean.
Unless you bother to look up Annex 5 (which is the panoply of EU State aid law) and check what the threshold for “affect trade” is in EU law (so low you won’t trip over it) you won’t realise that it continues to apply EU State law to many U.K. measures (eg on tax).
A discussion between @bricksilk and @JoshuaRozenberg that suggests that clause 1 of the JR and Courts Bill (remedy may be prospective-only) may be less harmful that feared. Watch this space, though.
Interesting to note that the MoJ press release chose to highlight this somewhat lukewarm endorsement from Ekins, of the Judicial Power Project (sometimes referred to as the Executive Power Project).
Pretty clear from that that he would have wanted to go much further (and indeed at the end eggs Parliament on to go further).
A reminder that an agreement with the EU on food health standards wouldn’t just help in relation to the NI Protocol: it would make 🇬🇧 food exports to all our close neighbours easier.
It would also reduce the costs and difficulties (which will be reflected in prices) that U.K. importers of food from the EU will soon face.
Since the current government promises not to reduce food standards and is unable to explain what (if any) divergence from EU standards it actually wants, its case against is pure dogma, unleavened by any consideration of U.K. public interest.
On the day on which the current government’s Bill on judicial review comes out, this is a really important article by Paul Craig on why there is no foundation for its claims, backed by its outriders in the Judicial Power Project, about “judicial overreach”.
As it may be TLDR I will try to pull out the key points.
The JPP’s speciality is to produce short and misleading summaries of so-called problematic cases. But in looking at these, you need a sense of scale. There are ‘000s of JR cases over decades. What does a list of ~50 selected cases tell you, when you stand back?