The government’s “vision” for Brexit is about rid of “gold-plated” EU regulations, Jacob Rees-Mogg has said.
Speaking at a parliamentary committee on Tuesday the Brexit Opportunities Minister said the EU had “imposed” regulations on the UK and that it was his job to get rid of them.
It comes as the UK government considers diverging from EU rules on pesticides on imported food, as well as car safety regulations.
“What is the vision in terms of Brexit opportunities, is that we should have an economy that is more efficient, that we should have the supply-side reforms, that we should get rid of the unnecessary, often gold-plated regulation that the European Union imposed upon us,” Mr Rees-Mogg told the public administration select committee.
“Very often we were outvoted in the council of ministers, we have things that came through by qualified majority voting, or we abstained on things because we knew that we would lose at that stage. It’s about freeing up the economy.”
Mr Rees-Mogg, an ardent supporter of Brexit, claimed that power would be transferred to the devolved nations as part of the change.
“There’s a wonderful flow of power from Brussels not just to Westminster but also to Edinburgh and the Cardiff and to Belfast,” he said.
Mr Rees-Mogg was appointed to his current role earlier this year but there was at the time little solid information provided from the government about what he role would involve.
In February he issued a plea to readers of The Sun to flag possible Brexit benefits to him – potentially crowdsourcing regulations he could scrap.
Mr Rees-Mogg has previously argued that the UK could go “a very long way” to rolling back high EU standards and said regulations that were “good enough for India” could be good enough for the UK.
“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that,” Mr Rees-Mogg told a parliamentary committee in 2016 a few months after the EU referendum.
“We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that.
But trade unions and opposition parties have said workers rights, environmental controls, product s standards, other protections should not be sacrificed as part of leaving the EU.
Ditching rules could make it easier for the government to sign trade deals with other countries around the world because the standards currently make it difficult to import goods from countries with lower or different ones.
But MPs warned last week that the benefits from such free trade agreements are uncertain and may not exist at all – a concern echoed by some trade economists who say the economic damage from leaving the single market massively outweighs any potential gains.
