Brexit didn't fail, it failed to deliver
You will be hearing a lot about Brexit because of the Makesfield by election, because all potential Labour leaders have made no secret of the fact that they would like to rejoin the EU and also because so many people are saying that Brexit has failed when in reality it has never been fully implemented.
I attended the Freedom Association’s conference Brexit Unleashed on 19th May and it certainly expelled a few myths about Brexit. This was not a small conference attended by nobody important. Pretty much every name involved in bringing about the referendum, from all parties, were there with perhaps the exclusion of Nigel and Dominic Cummings. Here is a list of the speakers:
- David Campbell-Bannerman
Lord David Frost
Rt Hon David Jones
Lord John Redwood
Lord Maurice Glasman
Graham Stringer MP
Rt Hon Baroness Kate Hoey
Sir Bill Cash
Sir Ian Duncan Smith
Mark Francois MP
Camilla Tominey
Lord David Hannan
Liam Halligan
Catherine McBride
Dr David Starkey
An impressive lineup. Oh and let’s not forget Steve Bray providing the music outside.
The disaster that the Uniparty predicted would happen after Brexit never did materialise. In fact if you ask any liberal they will tell you that the country took a 4% hit on it’s GDP because of Brexit. But this is based on a prediction made by the OBR before the referendum that there would be a 0.25% loss per annum for 16 years. We are now more than 6 years in from the date that the Brexit deal was put in place so we don’t need to look at predictions anymore, we can look at facts. This shows that since Brexit the nominal total trade growth (not adjusted for inflation) of the UK was up 41.7%. The EU, only up 30.1%. Real trade growth (adjusted for inflation) of the UK was 11.4%. The EU grew by only 5%. In fact Europe has the second slowest growing economy in the world. The slowest is Antarctica!!
But let’s go further back into history. In the 20 years prior to joining what was then the common market our economy was growing, on average by 3.5% per annum. In the 40 years that we were in the common market and subsequently the EU our economy grew by 1.5% per annum on average.
£25 billion was saved when we left the EU and yes, the promise made on the side of the bus was kept. All of this money and more WAS given to the NHS. Should we rejoin would we take this money back from the NHS? I am asking because the very people who want to rejoin the EU are the people saying that Reform UK will destroy the NHS.
There is a call to rejoin the EU but the cost of being a member is currently twice what it was when we left and set to rise higher.
There was supposed to be a mass exodus of personnel from the City but rather than leaving to work in mainland Europe they started working from home instead because of Covid. In fact the GDP generated by the City of London has gone up, not down since Brexit.
We have seen trade deals with the USA, India and the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and a large reduction in regulation, although not as much as there will be once Reform UK are in power.
Right now the situation in our country for farmers in particular is dire. We still retain all the EU regulation that we had before but offer none of the subsidies. And fishermen are seeing more and more of our fishing waters handed back to the EU. This is just part of Labour’s strategy to make voters think they Brexit isn’t working for them.
The so called “EU Reset” involves handing back power to Brussels because the current government are unable to run the country themselves. There is no legitimate reason to blame Brexit for our current malaise.
In fact the bill called the “EU partnership bill” introduced in the King’s Speech in May 2026 is very dangerous indeed for democracy. It invokes so called “Henry VIII clauses” which, once the bill passes allows ministers to pass laws relating to the EU in the future without anything being scrutinised by parliament. These future laws, which will not be presented to parliament, will include some “poison pills”, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for any future government to overturn any of these laws. How is this democratic in any way?
David Starkey felt that we are at a very dangerous time for our country. More dangerous than either of the world wars of the previous century. He believes we are in last chance saloon and the only solution would be for a government in power to take drastic, brave and radical action. This would involve parliament passing a single bill that would involve scrapping the Supreme Court, leaving the ECHR and scrapping the UKs human rights bill all at the same time and all at the start of the next government. No mean feat. In order to do this we would need to completely change the way the civil service operates including scrapping the cabinet office, a policy that I see Reform UK announced last week.
So what can we do now?
We need to Ramp up the Brexit campaign all over again and sell it as the success it has been and could be if we took full advantage of it.
We need to defend Brexit and point out the benefits all over again.
Brexit needs to be integrated into a political strategy that voters can get behind. We need to finish the job and that includes cancelling the Windsor framework and bringing Northern Ireland fully back into the UK.
The establishment still holds a lot of hostility towards democracy and has an agenda to transfer more and more power to foreign lawyers, despite Brexit. We should be governed by the rule of law not the rule of lawyers. We all need to work together to make that happen.