It isn’t going to be as simple as copying and pasting something on a computer, but the U.K. government’s Great Repeal Bill has been dubbed the ‘Control and Paste’ Bill, because that is what it seeks initially to do: take a snapshot of every piece of EU legislation and paste it into English law. Without it, or something like it, Britain would fall into a legal limbo on Brexit day as existing laws and regulations—some of which Britain has been operating under for some forty years and were never intended to be done away with—would cease to apply. Prime Minister Theresa May’s solution is to copy and paste it all into English law and then sort it out later. Sort of.
But how did Henry VIII get in there?
