Prorogation will remove life support from Bills

There is a list on the UK Parliament web site of Bills which have been introduced in the current sitting of Parliament which began in 2017. Not all are active. Some have gone the distance and become Acts and some have been withdrawn by their sponsors. However, that leaves a hundred or so which are under consideration either in the Commons or the Lords. Maybe many of those will never be given enough parliamentary time to proceed, but there are others which should not be lost. Prorogation will end all their careers except for those for which a special carry-over order is made.

My attention has been drawn to two Bills in particular, one whose loss will not be mourned by Europhiles and the other which will be.

The Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill would end free movement between us and the rest of the EU, which would otherwise continue because of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which keeps most EU law and EU-derived domestic law in place after exit day, including the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2016 and other law relating to free movement. (Section 8 of the Withdrawal Act does confer a power to make statutory instruments to prevent, remedy or mitigate any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively or any other deficiency in retained EU law, but a barrister advising activists in this area feels that it is unlikely that section 8 would empower ministers to end free movement by secondary legislation – although of course the point has not been tested in court as they have not tried.) So no doubt the PM and his Home Secretary will want to carry that one over.

On the other hand, this nasty government - even nastier than Mrs May's - will not go out of its way to ease the passage of Tim Farron's Refugees (Family Reunion Bill), which has had a First Reading in the Commons after Baroness Hamwee took it through all the stages in the Lords. It therefore needs only Commons approval, to change for the better the lives of some who have been through terrible trauma.