Revealed: How the European Union has say over UK Law

The process of how laws are made in the United Kingdom is a hot topic in the UK currently. Following the democratic vote in 2016 which saw Britain vote to leave the European Union, many expected Britain to take back control over the law-making process from the EU. The remain campaigners in 2016 rubbished the suggestion that vast swathes of British law originate from Brussels. In spite of this, UNN can today provide quantitative data which shows the scale of laws being imposed on Britain over 3 years after the vote.

European Union law comes in 3 main strands, regulations, directives and decisions. A regulation coming from the EU is a binding legislative act. Using data from the government legislation website, there are 123,549 regulations originating from the EU, with 583 this year alone. This may alarm many Brexiteers who saw this as a concern in 2016. In the year of the referendum in 2016 1,243 statutory Instruments were enacted in the UK and there were 1,166 regulations originating from the EU. These numbers seem to differ widely from the remaining narrative that the concern around law making an irrational Brexiteer fear.

The BBC reality checks feature before the referendum ran a feature that stated, “between 1993 and 2014 Parliament passed 945 Acts of which 231 implemented EU obligations of some sort”. However, these figures are a stark contrast to the “4,283 [Statutory Instruments] of which implemented EU obligations”. The impact of how much the EU influences British law is hotly debated, ‘business for Britain’ states that 60% of British law is influenced by EU law, although this number is placed far lower by others.

Robert Oxley from the Vote Leave campaign famously stated “If you stacked the entire EU rule book it would be higher than Nelson’s column. That’s an incredible amount of paperwork which British businesses, British employers, all the people who have to comply with this legislation have to deal with. It is cost and time added on to their businesses.” The status of EU law may come into sharper focus, should the Government lose next week in the British Supreme Court ruling as it is highly likely that the Cherry Case would then be referred to the European Court of Justice.

Oliver Down

Current Affairs Correspondent | My name is Oliver Down I am 22, and a staunch brexiteer. I am a Bristolian lad who studied politics in Leicester. I believe in free speech and accurate journalism and I won’t be afraid to give you “the other side” of the story!

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