Nobody is confronting the great Remainer lie about Brexit.
It’s now eight years since the referendum, and Leave backers aren’t doing enough to counter pro-EU propaganda
Eight years ago on Sunday, we went to vote in the Brexit referendum. Let’s not forget that most of our rulers never wanted it in the first place. It only happened because of the campaigning of Nigel Farage and Ukip and the determination of a bunch of Tory MPs like Sir Bill Cash. It became the largest act of democracy, and indeed the largest vote for anything, in British history.
Four years later, through a supreme effort, and in the teeth of the opposition of the anti-democrats and the blockers – including Sir Keir Starmer and most of the current Labour leadership – the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson and I smashed through the barriers and delivered the referendum result.
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We went on to sign the largest, widest, and deepest trade and co-operation agreement anywhere. We made Britain a free and independent country once again.
Where has that spirit of hope and optimism gone? In part, of course, it dissipated amid the Covid pandemic and the shock of the Ukraine war.
But it’s not just that. Those who never wanted to leave the EU have taken every opportunity, seized on every random economic figure, to tell us that Brexit was an irresponsible populist mistake. And since Boris’s departure, there has been no real counter-argument from the Government.
It’s not surprising so many believe – despite the actual evidence – that somehow “Brexit is failing”. Yet it really isn’t so.
Obviously any change on the scale of leaving the EU entails both costs and benefits. Assessing that trade-off is not just about economics and trade, but also about intangibles like control and national democracy, upon which free Western countries have traditionally put a high value.
So there will always be room for debate. But one thing we can be sure of is that the catastrophising of Project Fear was simply wrong. We accomplished the biggest change in this country’s economic and political model for 50 years, and you can barely see it in the figures.
The likely small hit from disentangling ourselves from the single market and customs union isn’t even visible in the charts. The disasters predicted by so many have simply not happened. So when the critics got so much wrong before, why should we believe them now?
Yet you still hear many who should know better, like the Office for Budget Responsibility, and many who don’t, like the actor Brian Cox on the BBC last weekend, claiming that Brexit is shrinking our GDP by 4 per cent. But this figure is not a fact: it is a prediction, a very unsafe one, made several years back, about the supposed drag on our GDP sometime in the next decade.
And the prediction just does not reflect reality. The truth is that, since we left the EU’s economic area at the end of 2020, our hourly productivity has grown faster than the eurozone’s and, according to the OECD, our overall economy has grown faster than that of France or Germany. There is every reason to think that both of these trends will continue.
Similarly, don’t believe the anti-Brexit hype about our trade performance. We are actually in the middle of a services trade boom, one unpredicted by the gloomy anti-Brexit economists.
Moreover, as the economist Catherine McBride has been repeatedly pointing out for the Briefings for Britain group, our goods exports to the EU and the rest of the world have performed roughly equally, and our goods imports from the EU have actually gone up faster than those from elsewhere, neither of which suggests that EU trade barriers are at the root of any difficulties we have.
So why do so many voters feel they aren’t getting what they hoped for from Brexit? One answer is that our problems are deep-rooted: housing and planning, unreformed public services, tax and spend at the highest-ever levels, the crackpot pursuit of renewables, and an economy that has got hooked on the sugar rushes of low-skill immigration and zero interest rates. Add to all this the pandemic, with its £400 billion debt, a shock which is going to take a long time to work through, and plainly the last few years would have been difficult come what may.
The other reason is that we have not delivered on our promises. We pledged to cut immigration and it has not happened. Quite apart from the negative direct effects, this failure has revealed just how much the levers of control are outside the government’s hands and how ineffective the British state really is.
Leaving the EU is the necessary condition for solving these problems. It doesn’t fix them in itself. We, the British people, still have to do that for ourselves. What Brexit does do – or should do, for the job is not entirely complete – is give us back control, the ability to govern our country in our own interests and in a way that suits us.
That is about changing the laws that we inherited from the EU. It’s about taking on the European Convention on Human Rights. And it is also about ending the passivity of the last couple of decades, in which too much of the British establishment seemed to prefer investing in our minority, non-controlling, share in the EU than in governing Britain in the interests of the British people.
Yes, we should have changed more and more quickly. But, again despite what you will hear from many, getting out of the EU has already made a big difference.
First of all, we have our democracy back. Here, we can change everything at elections. EU countries can’t. They can change their leaders but can only change the policies if they can persuade everyone else to agree.
We choose our governments ourselves, but the EU’s miscellaneous job-lot of presidents – including seemingly one who was forced to resign from his own government due to a corruption scandal – is currently being chosen in backrooms, divvied up among political groupings, and rubber-stamped by its parliament. Nor do we have to pay £10-12 billion a year net into the EU each year, a sum that would be a lot higher by now as the bloc has expanded its budgets and borrowing since we left.
We have got all the EU’s old trade deals and several new ones of our own, too, notably the huge trans-Pacific Partnership, which gives us free trade with the fastest growing economies in the world. We have cut our own tariffs, making prices cheaper in the shops – impossible within the EU.
We have begun to free up our financial services sector again to give back the City some of its old dynamism. We have our own flexible subsidy regime and we can reduce taxes and regulation within our new freeports.
We can change our own VAT rates, at least within Great Britain. We have a better-tailored farming support scheme, new procurement rules, greater freedom in foreign policy, streamlined trade processes, and an increase in fisheries quotas before we take back full control of our waters in two years’ time.
And above all we have control over our borders. Of course we have been far too generous with low-skilled migration, but we can now change those rules overnight, and absolutely should do so. We have also avoided the EU’s new migration pact, which would have made us take a share of all the illegal migrants coming into the EU.
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We could do more – in labour markets, competition policy, distancing ourselves from the excesses of net zero, and in dealing with the drag on reform created by the deeply unsatisfactory Windsor Framework in Northern Ireland. But that is not an argument for giving up and going back to the starting point.
That is why it is so dangerous to give Labour a free hand on Brexit. They are starry-eyed pro-Europeans who want to put us gradually back, bit by bit, under the thumb of EU rules. They will wind back the clock, make us subject to laws set to suit others, and weaken our democracy and our growth potential.
So when people say Brexit is failing, don’t listen. Point to the evidence, and be proud of what we did to make our country free and independent once again. And vote wisely on July 4. DT.
