Why protecting the environment may no longer be a good reason to rejoin the single market

Luke James, Brussels

In politics, timing is everything and that’s why a proposal made by Plaid Cymru’s European affairs spokesperson, Adam Price, in the Senedd last week stood out.

Speaking in a debate to mark the fifth anniversary of Brexit, Price called for a European Alignment Act that would see Wales continue to put EU legislation on our statute books, the first benefit of which, he said, would be that “we kept up with world-leading standards in areas like environmental protection.”

This was of course a central argument of the Remain campaign in 2016, at a time when David Cameron had long stopped hugging huskies and instead begun telling aides to “get rid of all the green crap.” It would also have been very timely in 2019, when a ‘European Green Deal’ was the headline policy of Ursula von der Leyen’s first term as European Commission President.

And there has been more recent evidence published that the UK is falling behind the EU on environmental standards.

‘More Trump’

However, Price was unfortunate to be speaking just hours after von der Leyen had launched the central policy of her second term: the ‘competitiveness compass’ – a typically innocuous sounding document, but one which adds up to an unprecedented deregulation drive that risks trashing the EU’s reputation for high standards. “The EU is changing course: less climate, more Trump,” was the headline of Dutch newspaper NRC.

As part of its answer to growing challenges from China and the US, the Commission plans to re-open and ‘simplify’ existing environmental rules through ‘omnibus’ legislation. First will be flagship directives of von der Leyen’s own first term, the corporate due diligence laws brought forward in an effort to avoid a repeat of disasters like the Rana Plaza factory collapse by ensuring large companies take responsibility for preventing environmental disasters and human rights abuses in their long global supply chains.

The EU’s carbon border tax, the directive regulating water quality and the deforestation regulation are among other pieces of environmental legislation already in the sights of the industry lobbyists whom the Commission is re-writing its rulebook to satisfy. Representatives of big oil companies like ExxonMobil and Total Energies were among 57 corporations represented at a consultation on the plans this week. They outnumbered representatives of NGOs and trade unions by five to one.

Deregulation

The Commission insists that they will only change reporting obligations, rather than the rules themselves. But the European Coalition for Corporate Justice warned this week that “the Omnibus proposal is not about cutting red tape—it’s about deregulation and cutting corporate accountability.”

The Compass contains even more radical deregulation plans. The creation of a ‘28th regime’ would allow some companies to opt out of national tax and labour law and operate across borders under a set of minimum EU-wide standards. Then there’s a proposal to “fight gold plating” which refers to countries implementing EU directives in a way that goes beyond the minimum standards.

An example of so-called ‘gold plating’ given by the UK Government when the Conservatives were in power was better terms for precariously employed workers.

The progressive argument for membership of the EU was always that, while our own social and environmental legislation is often already stronger than the European minimum, it provides a safety net to prevent rights being eroded beyond a certain limit by a radical right-wing government.

But a ban on ‘gold plating’ would turn that logic on its head.

In his Senedd speech, Price took care to say that he was “not engaging in magical thinking”, stating at the outset that Brexit had not been a “complete cataclysm”, especially for the south east of England, and that Keir Starmer was not going to accept rejoining the single market overnight.

‘Magical thinking’

It would be much fairer to level the accusation of ‘magical thinking’ at the current leadership of the European Commission. The deregulation policies have been toyed with and failed to materialise before. Attempts to stop ‘gold plating’ have been running into the sovereignty of member states for least a quarter of a century and the idea of the 28th regime goes back at least 15 years.

Price and other progressive advocates of rejoining the single market could point out that these long standing ideas haven’t yet led to the wholesale abandonment of the EU’s social and environmental standards. And with climate disasters becoming more regular and severe, it’s more likely the tide of global events will force EU leaders to return to its green policies before long. That’s before you even get on to whether we can afford to have trade barriers with the EU.

However, it seemed at times like the Senedd was debating a parallel universe. On the day the Commission accepted Trump’s invitation for a race to the bottom, the left was holding it up as a defender of environmental standards while Welsh Conservative leader Darren Millar was blasting it as a “barmy and bloated bureaucracy.”

The first thing we need to do in Wales is to ensure that the debate about our relationship with the EU maintains alignment with the reality of what is happening in it today.