Kemi Badenoch and the contradictions of Brexit
This week saw an amazing exchange at a European Scrutiny Committee hearing. It was between the BEIS Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and a few of the members of the committee, in particular with a Tory backbencher named David Jones. Before I cover this trade of words, I should tell you what the European Scrutiny Committee is and then a little about the BEIS portfolio.
When we were in the EU, the European Scrutiny Committee held what should have been the important role of looking over newly passed European legislation and then figuring out the best way for the UK to bed the new EU laws in. I say “should have” been an important role because a). no one except hardened Eurosceptics ever seemed to want to go near the committee and b). it didn’t seem to do a lot of scrutiny, mostly just gold plating everything from Brussels. Meaning, it tended to take the harshest view of the EU Directives possible and then advocate translating things into UK law in a way that was unnecessarily unhelpful to the smooth running of the United Kingdom and its economy. Why Eurosceptics would want to make EU law more severe than it had to be, I will leave you to ponder over.
Why the European scrutiny committee still exists given we’ve left the EU says a lot about Brexit all on its own. There is no new European legislation to scrutinise, so why can’t it disband? The short answer is another version of “real Brexit hasn’t been tried yet”; the committee’s website says “Since the end of the post-Brexit transition period (on 31 December 2020), the Committee has focussed on EU documents that fall within the scope of the Northern Ireland Protocol to the UK/EU Withdrawal Agreement.” Welcome, my friends, to the Brexit that never ends.
The BEIS Secretary job used to be one of the nicest ones in the cabinet to have. You were at the top table, but without a brief that had career ending traps baked into it, like the Home Office or Health Secretary. You had to look out for British business and a few other things (the actual contents of the brief have shifted a few times over the last couple of decades), but you weren’t in the Treasury, so if things didn’t work out, you always had Number 11 Downing Street to plausibly blame.
Since Brexit, it’s been a bit of a poisoned chalice and has become even more so very recently, given we don’t have a Brexit Secretary any longer. It is now the BEIS Secretary’s job to make Brexit unicorns turn into real, live horses. Which is how we ended up this week with Kemi Badenoch, someone spoken about as a future Tory leader, in a meeting with the biggest Brexitists on Earth, with the BEIS Secretary having to push back against the unrealistic expectations the Brexit faithful hold dear.
David Jones aggressively took the BEIS Secretary to task during the European scrutiny committee hearing for the REUL Bill having passed the House of Commons and then for Bandenoch to have subsequently “changed (her) approach completely”, a reference to the BEIS Secretary having helped in the dropping of the insane sunset clause for scrapping all EU derived law. Jones described this as “disrespectful of the House of Commons”. There is a lot to unpack here in and of itself, including what David Jones thinks the constitutional role of the House of Lords is at present, but there’s too many other things to cover.
Badenoch shot back aggressively herself. She pointed out that she’d had private meetings with Jones to discuss his concerns on this matter, followed by her tacitly accusing Jones of leaking the contents of those meetings to the Daily Telegraph (ouch).
Richard Drax, another Tory backbencher who himself is rather fond of Brexit, talked about the expected “bonfire of regulation”, and said he feared through the BEIS Secretary’s recent actions that “this bonfire won’t take place”. Then came the crucial point of the meeting: Badenoch responded to Drax’s comments by saying: "It is not the bonfire of regulations — we are not arsonists. I’m certainly not an arsonist. I’m a Conservative.”
This comment probably cost Badenoch any chance of becoming the next Tory leader. Yet she had to do it. As BEIS Secretary, it is her job to do her best for businesses in the UK. She cannot advocate for something that would cause great harm to business, so she did her duty and went along with the removal of something bad from a piece of legislation that would indeed have been an act of legislative arson. But the Brexitists won’t wear this; they are driven by a pure, non-amendable version of Brexit in which no quarter can be given, ever. To do so is to submit to “tyranny” in some way. It doesn’t matter if business in the UK would have been unduly affected by some foolish thing designed only for ideological purity, ideological purity is the whole point of leaving the EU as far as these chaps are concerned.
In other words, it’s reality v Brexit again. And, as always, reality wins. Which is unfortunate for Kemi Badenoch and her ambitions to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
Thanks for reading. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, please subscribe. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, even better. This is all the extra stuff you get with a paid subscription:
Semi-daily updates on the state of the country and where Brexit is going.
Sections from a book I partly wrote - and will complete for my paid subscribers over this year - entitled, How Brexit Gets Reversed. It is about what happened pre-referendum, during the referendum and then after it but pre-Brexit itself, with some inside stories about Farage, Vote Leave, and the Remain campaign, as well as what I think will happen in the coming decade(s) that leads to Brexit being slowly reversed - and most importantly, what pro-Europeans can do to help the process along.
Anything else I think might interest paid subscribers as they come up.
Thanks everyone and I’ll see you all again next week for the worst of Brexit.
How someone as partisan - not to say demented - as Cash was allowed to chair this committee is a mystery to me. The fact that someone as right-wing as Badenoch managed to provoke them speaks volumes about their own political stance. I once wrote an account of one of the many bees obsessing in their bonnets: https://inforrm.org/2015/04/17/bbc-and-the-european-scrutiny-committee-scrutinising-the-scrutineers-part-1-julian-petley/
Please note the BEIS no longer exists. From February 7th it was split into three departments, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), the Department for Energy Security and NetZero and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Badenoch is the Secretary of State for the DBT. Of course this in no way invalidates the thrust of the article.