When BoJo was caught speaking to activists about how Brexit was going he suggested, in the way that technophobes do, that all of the portents of doom (even those from his own government) are overdone "mumbo-jumbo" and he likened it all to the millennium bug. This was the fear at the end of 1999 that many older computers and micro-processors wouldn't roll over to the year 2000 and would fail catastrophically, impacting power supplies, banking and finance, food chains and just about everything else. One of the best responses was by a blogger who goes by the name of Slugger O'Toole (HERE).
Mr O'Toole gently explains that the millennium bug was a real problem overcome in many cases by rigorous testing and debugging of systems all over the world. It was not as BoJo would have you believe a non-issue dreamed up by a lot of people who wanted things to go wrong. O'Toole says it's a case of where things go smoothly after a great deal of effort, those who aren't aware of the effort think it all happened by magic, if it happened at all.
There is perhaps a parallel here with EU law. Many of the things that happen in this country are as a result of EU law. And EU law usually has a very long gestation period with a lot of consultation and very bright lawyers and civil servants. One might say there is no law like it in the world that has been pored over in 24 different languages for quite so long. Any legal bugs in it have been found and fixed well before it's applied. All of this gives rise to the view that either it's very easy or that it's so smooth we barely know that it's there at all. We take it for granted like the weather or gravity.
For BoJo and his Brexiteering chums this is what they thought. Either EU directives were a waste of time and money or they were ineffective or just unnecessary. They are about to find out what it's like to draft and implement a lot of law that will turn out to be (a) far more complicated and difficult (b) far more unpopular and (c) their responsibility completely.
In the leaked comments he talks of the UK being stuck in what he called the lunar orbit of the EU. This will be true whatever the outcome. The EU has a great deal of regulatory gravity (HERE) and since it will remain with a huge "pull" over us in future years. BoJo might be surprised at the laws he will be forced to pass after Brexit in order to keep trading with Europe or to keep European businesses operating here.
