Yes. Brexit was the right call.
Now we just need leaders who understand what it was about
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Yes, of course Brexit was the right decision. And that’s exactly what I said, yesterday, on BBC Politics Live when a lot of jaws in the studio hit the floor.
Amid the ninth anniversary of the British people’s decision to leave the European Union (EU), I took direct aim at the anti-Brexit ruling class in this country by listing just a few of the advantages we now enjoy being outside the EU.
Like the fact we no longer have to pay billions every year into the EU budget, billions more covering the EU Covid loans, and billions more supporting another round of ‘EU enlargement’, that will see another wave of poor countries, like Albania, Bosnia, and Serbia, take more out of the EU economy than they will put in.
Like the fact we now have an independent trade policy in this country that has made it possible for us to sign more than seventy trade deals with other nations around the world, including America and India. And like the fact we are no longer shackled to an inefficient, sluggish and divided EU block that represents a declining share of global GDP, down from more than 20 per cent in the mid-1990s to only 13 per cent today.
But you know what? Brexit, for me at least, was never just about the economics and it was never just about the final destination. Personally, I always saw Brexit as an off-ramp we could take to move in a completely different direction and firmly away from the dreary consensus that unites the Blairites and Brussels.
English conservative thinker Sir Roger Scruton once said he had supported Brexit and opposed the EU “because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter”. And I suspect what Scruton had in mind when he said this, much like millions of other people who voted for Brexit, were the less tangible things that lie outside the realm of a traditional cost-benefit economic analysis in the Treasury.
Things like strengthening our national representative democracy, parliamentary sovereignty, judicial independence, tradition of common law, immigration policy, the integrity of our national borders, and the ability of the British state to fulfil its most basic task —to prioritise its own people and keep them safe.
Indeed, this is why I’ve always thought one of the most revealing polling questions about Brexit was one that found most Brexit voters said they were willing to take a short-term economic hit if it meant they got a longer-term repositioning of Britain.
Now, have our domestic politicians ever since that vote for Brexit failed to use this opportunity to return us to being the fully sovereign, self-governing, and independent nation that we could be? Absolutely. I’ve written about this extensively.
And did Boris Johnson and the Tories betray the promise of Brexit by lying to the British people and presiding over the very kind of mass immigration and border chaos most Leavers (and many Remainers) specifically say they did not want? Absolutely.
But does the promise of Brexit still exist? Could we still, if we had the right leaders and government who knew what it was about, use the levers that Brexit has made possible to fundamentally change our country for the better and bring about what I call a “factory reset” in this country —putting our own people first, fixing the borders, ending mass migration, overturning the Blairite legacy, and building a completely different judicial, legal and political architecture in this country?
Again, absolutely. I do, genuinely, believe that. Which is why I said what I said on BBC Politics Live, even if it did cause some of those present to lose their minds.
And in case some of you remain unconvinced about the benefits of Brexit or others need some detailed arguments about why leaving the EU was the right move, then, exclusively for our most committed readers, today, my friend Gully Foyle, who many of you will know from Twitter/X, has set out 10 of the very big benefits that we now enjoy, from his forthcoming book 75 Brexit Benefits. Enjoy!
1. We no longer pay billions a year in core budget contributions to access “free” trade with our EU neighbours
The core EU budget contributions are calculated based predominantly on a member state’s Gross National Income or GNI. The UK was one of the biggest and richest EU member states, and so it was what is known as a “Net Contributor” – which basically means we put in more into the budget than we took out. The UK covered roughly 12% of the core EU budget contributions each year, so we would currently be paying in the region of 14-16 billion Euros per year after rebate and EU spending in the UK, to have the privilege of having a large trade deficit with the other member states. The EU has also increased the ceiling for how much of the EUs GNI it could take as budget contributions since the UK left, from 1.2% up to 1.4%.
2. UK tax and UK revenue now gets to stay in the UK, instead of going to Brussels
While we were an EU member, the Commission considered several revenue streams to be their “own resources” and so took the lions share of those as well. For example, 80% of all customs duties collected at the UK border, were also given to the EU to go towards the EU budget, which is quite literally billions every year. This now goes into UK services instead of whatever the EU wanted to spend it on.
And here are another eight big benefits …
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