Jacob Rees-Mogg has taken aim at the Civil Service after plans to scrap over 4,000 pieces of EU law were ditched.
The Government had pledged a “sunset” clause on all laws carried over from the trade bloc by the end of 2023 under its Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) bill.
The Tory MP has suggested “idleness” in the civil service is to blame, and hit out at its culture as the UK Government faces criticism for its climbdown.
Speaking on GB News, Rees-Mogg said Brexiteers have been “let down” by the civil service, suggesting he could have drawn up the legislation himself.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has sympathised with Kemi Badenoch
GB News
He told Patrick Christys: “I think Kemi Badenoch put on a very brave face on the failure of the civil service.
“If I remember rightly, it is against the ministerial code to blame the civil service so she couldn’t really lay into them.
“When I was in the Business Department, I was told to deal with about 350 pieces of EU regulation, we would need 300 more civil servants working full time for a year.
“I thought this was nonsense and said I could do them myself over a weekend.
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PA“These are snowflakey, work-shy civil servants.”
Speaking in the House of Commons, Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch insisted civil service “idleness” is not to blame on the matter.
Asked by Rees-Mogg whether this was the case, she said: “No, I don’t think it has come out of any idleness. If anything, I would say the civil servants have been working feverishly on this.
“What they have been doing is preserving, not repealing, and certainly not getting the reforms that we want. This approach means that we can now do that.”
She earlier told the Commons “no work has been wasted”, adding: “It is the very efforts that civil servants have made that have identified which bits of law need to be repealed and which ones need to be reformed.”
It comes as the head of the civil service union has called on mandarins to vote for strike action, saying he has “had enough” of attacks from ministers.
Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA, hit out on Thursday at claims that civil servants are part of an establishment “blob” working to frustrate Government policy and undermine ministers.
He told the union’s annual conference in Westminster that ministers “need to demonstrate they value civil servants”.
