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European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Exactly. People voting in the referendum might have been moved by that slogan “take back control”, but I do not honestly think many voters thought that that meant taking back control from a European Executive and handing it to Ministers of the Crown, outwith the powers and scope of Parliament to do much about it, yet that is effectively the proposal in clause 7.

I want to emphasise that this is not simply an exercise in transposing technical and necessary measures. The Government have extended the scope of the Bill into policy-making capability, which brings in the question of divergence. We have heard a lot recently about concepts of full alignment and this notion of diverging from rules and policies. The way clauses 7 and 9 have been drafted would allow Ministers, by order, through negative statutory instruments that we rarely get the chance even to vote on in this place, to make policy changes that could affect policy functions and the rights of our constituents—perhaps as part of a deregulating agenda—if that is indeed what the Government of the day sought to achieve.