A revolution in our laws is on the way

THE UK government’s Great Repeal Bill is an attempt to stop chaos erupting the day after we leave the European Union.

It may seem ironic that the government’s response to the Brexit vote is to transpose existing EU rules into UK law, but the country would face a legal crisis if swathes of legislation suddenly no longer applied.

Ministers face a monumental challenge. Not only do they have to negotiate the best possible deal from Brussels, back in Britain they have to re-engineer the statute book so that laws will still function once we have pulled out of the EU.

Time is short. The UK is due to leave the union in two years and it is not a simple case of cutting and pasting EU legislation into our legal canons.

Laws in Westminster and the devolved administrations will have to be adapted so they make sense once we are no longer under the remit of a host of EU institutions.

There is concern as to whether this process of tweaking will have sufficient parliamentary oversight. The Commons Library describes the challenge ahead as “one of the largest legislative projects ever undertaken in the UK”.

There is also the very thorny question of how the UK’s own single market should work. Countries across the EU agree to common rules so its own single market can function, and in some ways postdevolution UK is starting to resemble – as First Minister Carwyn Jones put it last month – a “miniEU”.

Who should set the common standards which will allow trade in goods and services to flow between the UK’s four nations unimpeded?

Up until now each nation has had to abide by EU law. But there will be outcry if Westminster and the UK government take on the framework-setting role played by Brussels today.

The devolved governments will not take kindly to an attempt to impose standards from London. There is widespread unhappiness about how the UK government conducted the consultation process in the lead-up to the triggering of Article 50. Ministers will want much more than to be invited around for a chat about what powers should be pooled.

Supreme Court judges will be wondering whether they will have to rule on torrid disputes between the different administrations. The atmosphere will be even more fraught than normal if demand for independence intensifies in Scotland.

Anything less than the full transfer of powers in relevant areas from Brussels to the devolved governments will provoke outrage. Plaid Cymru has already warned the Great Repeal Bill could result in the “biggest Westminster power grab since our annexation in 1536”.

Once the EU laws are converted into UK legislation, eurosceptics will look forward to repealing and amending rules they have long loathed. This will intensify the debate about what type of country we want the UK to become in the decades ahead.

The future is likely to feature chaotic days. We can hope that families will be spared turmoil. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2014 was 78.5%