UK PM Candidate Rishi Sunak Vows to Scrap All EU Laws in Britain

Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been one of the most vocal Brexit supporters, acknowledging that he was advised in 2016 that if he voted to leave the EU, his political career would have been "over before it had even begun." However, he seems to have stuck to his stance.

One of the 10 Downing Street hopefuls, Rishi Sunak, has pledged to scrap or reform all the remaining EU laws and regulations in the United Kingdom, should he be elected the nation's next prime minister.

"If I am elected, by the time of the next election, I will have scrapped or reformed all of the EU law, red tape and bureaucracy that is still on our statute book and slowing economic growth," Sunak stated on Sunday. "We need to remove power from faceless regulators and give that power to MPs in our Parliament."

In a Telegraph op-ed, Sunak shared an ambition to make the UK "by far the richest country in Europe within the next 15 years."

To start the ambitious journey, Sunak said that he would task a new Brexit delivery department with "reviewing all of the remaining 2,400 [EU] laws on our statute book." Additionally, Sunak has outlined three other priorities.

The first one would be to scrap the EU financial services regulations in the UK to trigger "a Big Bang 2.0." for the City that "will help investors and insurers put money into assets such as infrastructure that stimulate growth and will reap long-term rewards for our country."

Then, Sunak pledged to "remove the burdens of GDPR" - the EU's data protection rules - in order to replace it with "the most dynamic data protection regime in the world."

"The EU’s Byzantine rules are preventing British tech companies from innovating and public services from sharing data to prevent crime. As any internet user can see, GDPR – with all its bureaucratic box-ticking – is clearly not working and needs to be replaced," Sunak said.

The third goal would be to "ensure that we can speed up the clinical trials approval process" that, in Sunak's belief, is currently "complicated and slowed down by EU red tape."

Sunak is one of the five candidates to claim the seat of the UK prime minister and the leader of the Conservative Party, joined in the race by Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss, Tom Tugendhat, and Kemi Badenoch, who is currently leading in the Sunday Telegraph Tory poll with 31% of those polled. Second comes Truss with 20%, followed by Mordaunt with 18%. Sunak and Tugendhat are currently trailing behind them.

In the second round of voting on Boris Johnson's potential successor, Sunak came first, securing 101 votes, followed by Mordaunt with 83 votes, Truss with 64 votes, Budenoch with 49, and Tugendhat with 32.