EU rules account for 65% of UK law


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Via Business for Britain:

Our research shows that 64.7 per cent of the laws in force in the UK today either originate from the European Union (EU) or are deemed to be EU influenced by the House of Commons Library. […] The percentage of laws originating from the EU is far higher than numbers previously cited by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, but also lower than those quoted by Nigel Farage in last year’s head to head TV debates.

The key findings were:

  • Between 1993 and 2014, 64.7 per cent of UK law can be deemed to be EU-influenced. EU regulations accounted for 59.3 per cent of all UK law. UK laws implementing EU directives accounted for 5.4 per cent of total laws in force in UK.
  • This body of legislation consists of 49,699 exclusively ‘EU’ regulations, 4,532 UK measures which implement EU directives and 29,573 UK only laws.
  • This large percentage is driven by EU regulations. This is important because EU regulations are transposed into national law without passing through Parliament. Hence, they do not appear in studies by the House of Commons Library such as the most recent, placing the proportion of EU legislation at just 13.3 per cent.

On Wednesday, I have duties in the European Scrutiny Committee to examine the “EU-level framework for co-ordinating and assessing Member States’ structural reforms and fiscal/budgetary policy and for monitoring and addressing macroeconomic imbalances.” This is the scale of the necessary papers:

EU-Semester-papers

No one should be in any doubt that, following the Lisbon Treaty which implemented the European Constitution, we live in a new European nation without democratic consent which generates most of our laws. Only a Conservative vote can deliver a referendum on our continued membership.

You can download the full Business for Britain paper here.

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Comments & Responses

One Response so far.

  1. patently says:

    There’s an EU-level framework for co-ordinating and assessing Member States’ fiscal & budgetary policies?? That worked well, as I’m sure Greece will agree…

    So we give up the democratic oversight in favour of a system that doesn’t work… wonderful!