The Brexit Bill, whose Second Reading we agreed on Monday, will transpose all of the EU laws and rules and regulations onto the UK Statute Book on the day we leave.

That will ensure the greatest possible degree of continuity, and will, I hope, assuage the concerns of all of those people who argue that Brexit will mean the end of their favourite EU rules – for workers’ rights, environmental protection and so on.

Those things will be identical the day after we leave to the day beforehand, after which the UK Parliament can at its leisure, delete, amend or improve the corpus of EU law we have inherited. That process is an absolutely essential part of Brexit, and of ensuring a seamless handover to UK control, and so I strongly supported it in Parliament.

One aspect of the Bill has, however, caused a degree of angst both amongst we supporters of Parliamentary democracy vis-a-vis the Executive; and also amongst those who would like to scupper the Brexit process as a whole.

It’s the so-called Henry VIII Clause in the Bill, which will thereafter allow Minsters to amend or repeal the EU legislation not by primary legislation, heard on the floor of the House; but by Statutory Instruments, which at most are debated ‘in committee’ upstairs. In normal times, I would be the first to squawk about any such clause, since it allows the Government too much power, and apparently lessens the scrutiny powers of the Parliament.

Yet if we were to treat all 20,000 or so EU Acts which are to be brought across as Primary Legislation (of which we have room for perhaps 20 per year), it would take us hundreds of years to consider it. And anyhow, do we really need to spend weeks discussing the EU labelling regulations when there are so many much more important things that we will have to be doing? Not only that, but the Henry VIII clause will allow the Government to repeal or amend the EU legislation, but it will of course not create any new law; and there is a two-year ‘sunset' clause, which says that if it has not been implemented within two years it will fail. What’s more, of the 20,000 acts, 8,000 were originally considered in our Parliament under Secondary Legislation procedures, the other 12,000 became law without being considered at all. So why should it now be necessary to bog ourselves down by using Primary Legislation procedures to consider it?

So while I understand the concerns both of the pure libertarians, and of the Remainers, allowing Henry VIII on this occasion makes very good practical sense. The people voted for us to leave the EU, and so it must now be. Those who disagree with the majority must not be allowed to use abstruse Parliamentary procedures to prevent it.