The Sunday Express, January 3, Martin Howe
Last Thursday on New Year’s Eve, at 11.00pm European Union law ceased to apply in Great Britain, exactly 48 years after European Community law started to apply when we joined the Common Market at the end of 1972.
This is a huge and very beneficial change. For years, our country has been covered by ever growing thickets of EU laws, rules and European Court judgments. These were all enforceable in our courts, over-rode laws made by our own Parliament, and could not be escaped from or changed without the EU’s agreement. This had a toxic effect on our democracy, because it removed democratic control and the accountability of our members of Parliament for a huge section of the laws that governed us. Now that Parliament has regained control of our laws, neither MPs nor governments can hide behind Europe as an excuse for not doing what electors vote for.
We now have the freedom to make changes to the laws which we have inherited from the EU, and not to follow future changes which the EU would have imposed upon us if we had we stayed in it. Freedom of course means the freedom to make mistakes as well as the freedom to make good choices, so what we make of it is up to us. But I am optimistic that we can do much better than Europe in fashioning laws which will encourage hi-tech industries such life sciences, artificial intelligence and fintech to flourish here.
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