Civil servants are blocking government efforts to cut EU legislation after Brexit because they harbor a Remain bias, Attorney General Suella Braverman has claimed.
The cabinet minister said she had battled with officials who were unable to “imagine the possibility of life outside the EU”.
“Some of the biggest battles you face as a minister are as best you can with Whitehall and internally with civil servants, as opposed to your political battles in the chamber,” Ms Braverman told the Sunday Telegraph.
The government’s chief legal officer, who campaigned for a Leave vote during the Brexit referendum, said the backlash against post-Brexit reforms was “something I didn’t expect”.
The Attorney General said: “Don’t take this as an opportunity to criticize the civil service. But what I’ve seen, time and time again, [is] that there is a bias towards staying.”
Ms Braverman added: “I will say it. I saw opposition to some of the measures that ministers wanted to propose. Because there is an impossibility to imagine the possibility of life outside the EU.”
The minister said the government’s Brexit options bill would be “absolutely critical” to making it easier for ministers to tear up retained EU rules as part of the push for deregulation.
As the government struggled to explain the benefits of scrapping vague rules and regulations, Ms Braverman said “our new freedom after Brexit is to make sure British rules work for British companies”.
The Attorney General is understood to have approved the repeal of parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol – giving Boris Johnson legal cover to take his radical move to unilaterally replace a key part of his Brexit deal.
Her latest comments on Brexit come after German Foreign Minister Analena Berbock and her Irish counterpart Simon Coveney issued a rare joint statement condemning Mr Johnson’s protocol bill.
“There is no legal or political justification for unilaterally violating an international agreement made only two years ago,” they said.
Lords Labor leader Baroness Smith said she expected the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill to reach the Lords before October as she said the move had “really upset people”.
“I’ve already had a number of phone calls last week and people queuing outside my door to talk about what we can do about this bill,” she said on the BBC’s Northern Ireland Sunday Politics programme.
Meanwhile, Ms Braverman also said Britain’s “entitlement culture” was “out of control” – blaming the European Court of Human Rights after a controversial deportation flight to Rwanda was halted following an appeal at the Strasbourg court.
“The culture, the controversy around the entitlement culture, has turned on its head a lot of common-sense decisions that are in line with British values,” she said. “Rights-based claims have impeded much of our immigration and asylum policy.”
The minister also attacked “stretched and strained interpretations” of the UK’s Human Rights Act by lawyers and judges – particularly Article Eight, the right to a private family life, and Article Three, the prohibition against torture.
The government’s plan for a replacement “bill of rights” exempts the government itself from the obligation to uphold free speech protections, legal experts have told The Independent.
Clauses included in the bill specifically exempt laws made by ministers from the new free speech test – meaning it will not protect people from “the various threats to free speech made by the government”.
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