There is not going to be a bonfire of the red tape. Not any time soon, at least. Instead, Brussels bureaucracy is being repatriated.

That some Eurosceptics will be surprised vindicates Theresa May’s cunning moniker of “the great repeal bill”. Yes, the bill will repeal the European Communities Act 1972, which signed Britain up for the European project. But its far meatier task is to copy on to the British statute book the vast and complex web of European regulations.

The difficulty with that is that the regulations currently make sense in an EU context — about 1,000 pieces of legislation need to be tweaked within the next two years so that they make sense for post-Brexit Britain. It is worth noting that the white