Thanks for this.
My initial reading of the story agreed with a couple of others - that they weren’t enshrining a “the sky is blue” type fact in law, which makes sense.
But politics, it turns out, is political.
What strikes me about this process of reconciling EU and UK law is that there doesn’t seem to be a default setting. We can’t read the decision to maintain an EU provision in UK law as a kind of neutral, status quo preserving action. We also can’t read a decision to not bring an EU provision into UK law as a neutral, this-was-the-point-of-brexit action.
The me the biggest test, if they are referring back to 2006 legislation is to ask what the present state of animal welfare in the UK is. If that 2006 law is working well then I don’t think that dropping the EU provision will necessarily have much of an impact since the people who enforce and promote compliance with that law probably aren’t going to chance what they are doing. But for people who are concerned about the current state of animal welfare, the government using Brexit to signal that they aren’t taking a strong stance in favour of animal welfare is a big, legitimate concern.
