The Tony Blair Institute is calling on the next British government to resolve issues with the European Union by simply copy-pasting European Law into British law — rendering Brexit meaningless.
Asserting, based on polling commissioned by itself, that “the British public’s views are beginning to shift” on Brexit and “more than two-thirds of voters think the UK should be in a closer relationship with the EU”, the Tony Blair Institute argues the time to resolve issues such as the “unfinished” nature of Brexit in Northern Ireland by falling in line with Brussels’ regulations in exchange for smoother trade.
It describes this as a process of so-called “dynamic alignment with relevant EU laws and appropriate governance structures to ensure compliance, including with a role for the Court of Justice of the EU.”
The premise of the paper being that “[a]ny attempts by the UK government to move its laws entirely away from the EU’s and its regulatory frameworks… are eventually bound to fail” and that Britain “needs to recognise the reality in which EU rules will continue to affect the UK after Brexit,” the offer of this defeatist solution is perhaps unsurprising.
“It’s no surprise that the Tony Blair Institute should come up with such a suggestion. It has never really understood Brexit,” remarked David Jones, a pro-Brexit MP for the Conservative Party, in comments to The Telegraph.
“The British people voted to leave the European Union precisely to be rid of dynamic alignment, and to enable the UK to strike its own course in the world,” he recalled.
“This proposal would leave the UK as a vassal state of the EU, absorbing laws without any democratic input. It is a preposterous suggestion and should be instantly dismissed.”
However, Blair may have been emboldened to call openly for an ad hoc reversal of Brexit by recent news that the Conservative government was itself looking at a so-called Swiss-style deal with the European Union, which would mean a return to Free Movement migration on almost the same terms as prior to Brexit and piecemeal adoption of EU regulations on similar terms to those proposed by the Labour grandee’s institute.
Indeed, the British government made a shocking admission in September that Blair and europhile former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern were working with ministers behind the scenes to, supposedly, fix issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol, which has left part of the United Kingdom essentially still inside the European Union for many purposes, causing its regional government to collapse.