Jill Rutter

The UK result leaves me deeply disappointed and profoundly concerned.

Brexit means Brexit.

No, there weren't really specifics there, but you have to remember that the dislike of EU regulation goes a long way back.

If you remember back to Mrs Thatcher's speech in Bruges back in 1989, she talked about we haven't just rolled back the frontiers of the state in the UK to have them reimposed from Brussels.

And successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, really didn't like some of the regulation coming out of Brussels.

They didn't like the fact that the EU

European Court of Justice might, after action by the European Commission, find that the UK hadn't implemented EU rules properly, might fine the UK.

And I think there was a feeling, two sets of feelings.

One, that the EU did far too much regulation.

It was far too burdensome.

But secondly, also, that quite often the UK was the only country that really followed the laws.

So we hamstrung our industries more than other countries were.

but also that civil servants back in the UK tended to gold plate EU directives from the way in which we translated them into UK law.

So there's a big feeling that actually, you know, if we had control of our laws, that phrase Joel's been mentioning from the referendum campaign, then we could do things differently.

And of course, we'd be making regulation for one country or one set of nations, rather than having to do slightly sort of compromise, patch together regulations.

deals between the 28.

So the original proposal, which came, I think, from Jacob Rees-Mogg, really, as a sort of business secretary and before that as the minister for various things, including Brexit regulation, wanted to sunset all that EU law that we had transferred over into UK law, the thing Theresa May did to make sure that we had a sort of complete statute book when we actually left the EU.

He wanted to sunset it all on a date and say if ministers hadn't specifically said we want to keep that law, then it would just fall away.

What happened was over the course of a number of different Conservative prime ministers, we ended up with...

A complete reversal.