Brexit Camp could decide to adopt all EU laws in order to speed up withdrawal from the EU

The gossip in the corridors of the House of Commons right now is about what the Tory Government will chose to do as Britain heads for the exit door in the wake of the historic vote to leave the EU on 23 June 2016.

What the future holds is beginning to take shape, according to lobbying firm Bell Pottinger that’s close to the Tory Party.

“Enthusiasm among Brexiters for an indefinite delay in notification of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty has paled noticeably since the weekend,” reports Gavin Davis of Bell Pottinger.

The Brexit Camp are smitten by the firm rejection from EU institutions and EU Member States like Spain to entertain informal talks about exit terms until Article 50 has been invoked by the UK. In addition, the Brexit Camp have also been concerned by recent remarks by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who suggested delaying Article 50 notification and then holding a second referendum on new terms. This would amount to a betrayal of the outcome of the Referendum on 23 June.

“Most significantly, some Brexiters note that Article 50 notification triggers what would be, in effect, irreversible change. Once that notification is issued, the terms of withdrawal either require agreement by a majority of other Member States and a majority of the European Parliament (unlikely in each case to be better than what was rejected by the voters last week) or, failing agreement, a simple expiry of the applicability of the Treaties to the UK after two years,” explains Davis.

It’s clear that if at some future date the UK had a change of leadership and put the matter of rejoining the EU on the back of a public vote, then it could only rejoin on the terms offered to all other applicant countries.

In simple terms, that’s a legally binding commitment to adopt the Euro currency, agree to join Schengen and abandon the rebate.

All of that would be tantamount to a much worse set of conditions than those rejected in the Referendum last week.

“In other words, Brexiters increasingly believe that once Article 50 notification has been triggered, the UK's withdrawal from the EU is locked in,” says Davis.

For that reason, the Brexit Camp has started to draw up its own preferred timetable. There is increasing chatter around the idea of seeking to complete withdrawal by 1 January 2019 – requiring that Article 50 notification should come no later than 1 January 2017 and possibly hard on the heels of the Tory leadership election or as soon as the new Prime Minister is in place on 9 September 2016.

So where does this leave the EU General Data Protection Regulation in a Brexit world?

The Remain Camp had argued that withdrawal of the UK would require dozens of new Bills and years of Parliamentary time in order to unwind the UK from EU-wide regulation. Indeed, an independent House of Lords Committee established before the Referendum reported that such a process could take as long as 9 years to complete and even then, there’s no guarantee that all laws linked to the EU would be repealed as it will be in the public interest to maintain some on the statute books in any event.

So the Brexit Camp are planning to circumvent this and propose to adopt the same procedure which former colonial legislatures followed when they were preparing for independence from the UK back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

This means adopting the whole of current law - the entire corpus of European Union laws - wholesale and unamended into UK domestic legislation.

This could be achieved in a single monster-size Bill that would need to be adopted complete and without amendment.

The Bill would ensure that at the moment of Brexit the UK's legal and regulatory system would be wholly aligned with and entirely compliant with the European Single Market. This would solve potential issues such as whether the UK is an ‘adequate country’ for personal data transfers from the EU into the UK.

And of course the GDPR will apply in full and effectively replace the now out-of-date Data Protection Act 1998.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it may appear and such a strategy – if pursued by the Brexit Camp and the new Prime Minister – would enable subsequent Parliaments to debate, reform, update, amend or repeal items of this legislation piece by piece, as successive generations of elected politicians chose.

The attraction of such a strategy to the Brexit Camp is compelling, according to Lewis. “It would enable the repatriation of the legislative powers ceded to and used by the European institutions since 1973 within a short timescale, rather than taking many years to consider and bring back each one,” he said.

Such a legislative vehicle might have another advantage too as it could include the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972 that led to the UK’s accession to the EU in the first place.

Clearly, such a strategy, if adopted, will also frustrate the Remain Camp in the House of Lords as the monster Bill will be the instrument whereby the will of the British people to leave the EU would be enacted.

Any amendment to the monster Bill would therefore be seen politically as a direct attempt to reverse the outcome of the Referendum and therefore undemocratic or be a measure that will ensure non-compliance with the European Single Market.

The Brexit Camp hope that this will snooker the Remain Camp from trying guerrilla tactics to slow or block the UK's withdrawal from the EU.

Should this happen, as some commentators in Westminster firmly believe, then it’s GDPR through the front door for all organisations wanting to continue to do business across the EU.

And that just might happen.