It is difficult to believe that it was a decade ago that David Dimbleby announced with the dawn that Britain had voted to leave the European Union.
Since then, the common wisdom has been that everything that has gone wrong, especially with the economy, is somehow attributable to Brexit. In the immediate aftermath of Covid there was chaos at airports, including Amsterdam, Dublin and Stockholm. Because such chaos was also present at British airports, there were claims that it was all due to Brexit!
Yet Brexit was not only an end but, crucially, a means. It freed us up, had we only been willing to take advantage of it, to throw off the shackles of rules and regulations and trade freely with the whole world. It enabled us to remove unnecessary bureaucracy and to reduce the burdens on employers. It enabled us to repeal uncongenial law. In short, we were once again able to make our own laws, control our own borders and set our own trade terms.
Instead, Theresa May made an unholy mess of the negotiations, not helped by her sacrificing her own majority through an ill- advised and hubristic general election.
Boris’s promise to get Brexit done was an excellent electoral soundbite but it was not followed through with any brave or concrete action.
The result was a mess and the total betrayal of Northern Ireland. It is little wonder that the public ran out of patience with all the shenanigans but we continue to neglect the issue at our peril.
The reason there is a growing view that we should ultimately rejoin the EU – even though there is no acceptance whatever on joining the euro, opening up our borders again and paying an enormous re- joining fee – is a growing weariness with the whole subject.
The resistance to Starmer’s efforts to reset, as he called it, our relations with the EU, stemmed more from resentment that any Government should try to disown the result of a clear vote than from conviction that we were right to leave.
‘Farage and his followers opened the door of the EU prison,’ writes Ann Widdecombe
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PA
The utter rightness of that decision will only be manifest when we have a Government willing to take advantage of the opportunities open to us but ignored.
In private, serious players in the EU admitted that one of their fears was that Britain would become “Singapore on Thames”, that is to say that we would become economically competitive with the bloc.
How then must they have laughed when one of the first things that we did was to put our corporation tax up to the same level as that of France and then watch in amazement while businesses went off to the Irish Republic. Competitive? Not us!
And yet, despite all of that, Brexit has not been the trading or economic disaster the gloom-mongers predicted. ONS data prove that many of the predictions were wrong and that in many areas we have done well. I commend the recently published book Brexit, The Facts Strike Back to all readers.
Farage and his followers opened the door of the EU prison. All we need now are politicians bold enough to take the country through it.
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