Just over a year after Britons voted to leave the European Union, the United Kingdom government on Thursday unveiled the first piece of legislation to make it a reality a 62-page bill that anti-Brexit politicians are already vowing to block.

The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill aims to convert some 12,000 EU laws and regulations into UK statute on the day the country leaves the bloc. That is scheduled to be in March 2019.

All those rules can then be kept, amended or scrapped by Britain's Parliament, fulfilling the promise of anti-EU campaigners to "take back control" from Brussels to London.