WE have come to expect Paul Nuttall’s weekly rants about Brexit, but when he dismisses today’s worries as being like ‘nonsense about how disastrous the Millennium Bug was going to be’ he’s way out of his league.

There was a lot of code written in the 70s and 80s which just used two digits for the year date. Computer memories were small so every byte mattered. I know because I wrote some of it. Much of it was still in use in the 90s, when people woke up to the problem. So action was taken.

Governments led, firms committed resources, individuals spent many hours checking and re-writing programs. We did not take refuge in meaningless slogans or waste two valuable years arguing amongst ourselves about what we wanted, before coming up with a plan immediately disowned as unworkable by those supposedly responsible (Davis and Johnson).

People got down to the problem and sorted it. Successfully. But it took a lot of effective planning and hard work.

There was no Millennium bug disaster – not because the threat was not real, but because it was dealt with properly. Comparison with Brexit fails on every point.

Roger Barlow Plumley