Welcome to F.T. Politics, the Financial Times's podcast on British politics.

I'm Sebastian Payne and in this week's episode we'll be discussing Brexit for a change and how ready

Britain and Brussels are for the next round of negotiations. I'm delighted to be

joined by George Parker, the FT's political editor, Alex Barker, our process bureau chief, Brexit

Ed to Daniel Dombi and Jill Rutter from the Institute for Government.

Thank you all for joining. So it's been another big week for Brexit. The UK

government has published the first crucial pieces of legislation

that will make leaving the EU a reality.

Theresa May's government has also conceded that Britain will have to pay the so-called

divorce bill for leaving the block, which means

that the talks won't quite collapse straight away.

But there are still many doubts about whether Mrs May's government has the authority and the capacity

to actually make Brexit happen.

So George Park, let's begin with the very exciting great repeal bill,

which was then known as the repeal bill, which is now known as the European Union Withdrawal Bill.

So that came out this week. Why is it significant?

Well Theresa May said it was the biggest moment so far in the Brexit story because it's of course the bill

which will end the application of the European Communities Act in the UK which gives supremacy to European Union law

and will basically be a huge copy and paste job where we're taking European law and

place it onto the British statute but the objective being that no one will notice a

legal difference on the day we actually leave the

European Union. So that's the technical bit of it. Political significance of course it's

...