Boris Johnson has vowed (for what that’s worth) to move “ever faster” to unshackle Britain, pledging to scrap thousands of EU laws still in place in the UK. The announcements were timed to coincide with the second anniversary of Britain’s formal departure from the EU, at 11pm on Jan 31 2020. The drive is an attempt to refocus minds on one of his main feats as Prime Minister – securing a deal that delivered the UK’s EU exit.

He said: “Our new Brexit Freedoms Bill will make it easier to get rid of retained EU law, the weird system by which EU legislation occupies a semi-sacred place on the UK statute book.” He wrote that Brussels will find it “impossible to hold back the UK and impossible to stop this country taking advantage of our new freedoms – and we will go ever faster”.

As yet there are no details, but that doesn’t stop the British press giving the matter acres of coverage. Meanwhile the remoaner crowd is gearing up for a wail-a-thon, dubbing it “accelerated fascism” over what will amount to little more than timid tinkering around the edges. We’ll see sprigs trimmed off the tree, but it’s whole branches that need going at with a chainsaw.

The task of Brexit deregulation is not something that can be cobbled together in the middle of a crisis to distract the media. Pruning the odd mad cap regulation here or there may make for good headlines, but Brexit requires a fundamental rethink of our entire regulatory approach across a number of vital sectors. What we need to see is a reversal of EU energy directives, a scrapping of green targets and a fundamental overhaul off our food supply chains.

If the government is remotely serious about the cost of living crisis, it will have to do better than to trim VAT. We’ll need to see a scrapping of all the market distorting stealth taxes and subsidies that favour useless wind turbines. We need a complete overhaul of water regulation, removing any barriers to new reservoirs. The Habitats Directive which complicate flood protection works needs to go.

Meanwhile, the food industry is long overdue a structural rethink. At present the entire food production model is based on the ready availability of cheap and exploitable labour. It cannot remain the same. Moreover, meat production must move away from the EU veterinary system.

The problem with a veterinary system is that (as the name implies) it relies on veterinarians. As much as there’s a global shortage of qualified vets, exacerbated Covid, it’s also a useless and wasteful system. Vets have no place in a modern food safety system. Their main concern is keeping animals alive and well. When an animal has been slaughtered, the core skill set of vets is somewhat redundant. The ideal veterinary controls, therefore, would be no veterinary controls except for live animals.

As it stands, we’re employing expensive and overqualified people to do a job they aren’t good at. Being that they are a system cost, the commercial drive is to get them as cheaply as possible and that usually means newly qualified, with limited English language skills and no enforcement experience in British slaughterhouses. The system was, and is, a travesty. Not least, having been detached from the local authority enforcement infrastructure, it lost vital local intelligence on how the trade was functioning; where the cheats were and who was cutting corners.

Therein lies the opportunity of Brexit. Over the years, much of the function of regulatory enforcement has been passed to remote regulators as opposed to local authority control. We now have the chance to restore real local government on everything from food safety to immigration enforcement. While we’re at it, we need to rethink local government procurement rules – many of which are of EU origin. We also need to reverse the landfill directive and the Waste Framework Directive, removing the tax on landfill and scrapping carbon taxes so to get a grip on the fly-tipping epidemic.

To accomplish this, the government will have to go up against various blobs within the Westminster establishment and the powerful environmental lobby – and face down ever more shrill wailing from the media. This agenda needs the energy and tenacity of Thatcher, who was never afraid to be unpopular with the press pack.

This is precisely what we won’t get. Virtually everything this government does is about managing the headlines. In this instance, Johnson is looking to shore up his base who are beginning to regret voting for him. They’ll be thrown a bone and it will generate a few favourable headlines, but nothing to suggest we’re making the most of Brexit. The Daily Express will obligingly publish headlines along the lines of “Boris scraps crazy EU rules on ride-on lawn mowers” (just what the Red Wall was pining for), but if you were expecting a newly energised government grasping the torch of Brexit opportunity, then we have a bridge to sell you.

Many of the reforms we need not only means going up against the green blob, it flies in the face of Johnson’s flagship Net Zero policy. At some point he is going to have to choose between Brexit and Net Zero. He cannot fudge the issue.

If he doesn’t he will not only have squandered Brexit, he’ll have done enormous damage to British business. The main reason we left the single market was to restore regulatory sovereignty. That decision can at considerable cost. Frictionless trade is a by-product of regulatory harmonisation. This government made a conscious decision to sacrifice EU trade for regulatory sovereignty. To then do nothing with it is to harm British exports for no discernible gain.

No doubt Tory donors will be able to buy the regulatory reforms they want, but the object of Brexit was to bring real power closer to the people – to ensure they have a real say in the rules that affect them. For as long as Net Zero is the central policy of this government, we can safely say there will be no major reform of adopted EU laws and in fact, will track any new ones accordingly, thus major policies such as heat pumps and EVs will be foisted on us whether we want them or not.

More to the point, any Brexit Freedoms Bill will undoubtedly face unprecedented opposition in the House of Lords, and face a number of legal challenges from green NGOs where deregulation falls foul of international laws and treaties. Whatever meagre tinkering the government has in mind is already dead in the water unless it goes to war with the establishment. Being that it isn’t prepared to do this over illegal immigration (the issue that could cost them the next election) there is no reason to believe they will do this over Brexit.

Though we have yet to see the details of this Brexit Freedoms Bill, it’s safe to say it will be unimaginative, unambitious and underwhelming. It will be an electoral decoy with a shopping list of Tory donor demands dressed up as buccaneering Tory red meat. Nothing that will require spending any significant political capital – but just enough to keep the Boris fan boys on side.

The short of it is that the Tories won’t deliver meaningful Brexit reforms because they never wanted it to begin with. Cameron led the remain campaign and Johnson was hedging his bets either way. These plastic patriots have no intention of making good on their promises. There is only one manifesto offering the Brexit we voted for and it’s that of UKIP. Johnson, once again, is taking us for a ride.