Brexit, Freedom and Real Functioning Democracy Should Be The Default Setting for the UK

 What we all agree about, from all sides of the political spectrum, is that UK has been badly managed in so many ways. But that's really got nothing to do with Brexit. 

 Even for viewers of BBC’s Question Time and Guardian readers, we all know that the issue of Brexit raises tensions and Britain has still yet to make the most of the opportunities of Brexit.

In a recent Guardian survey, 40% of leavers say the UK economy is significantly weaker after leaving the EU. However, it’s also true: they realise it is complex, and that Covid and the war in Ukraine, the way the government left us with poor energy security and high energy bills, these all have had their part to play.

The interesting stuff happens when you talk to people individually. Even loyal Tory supporters and a large chunk of Tory MPs like John Redwood, Mark Francois and Iain Duncan Smith admit that the government has not made the most of the UK’s independence. Some 70% of leave voters think there is a way Brexit could benefit the economy in a way that politicians have not yet materialised.

When asked their main reason for voting for Brexit in a Guardian survey recently, 68% of leavers cited “having more control over our own laws”, and 67% said “stopping EU officials having control over the UK” continue to be the main concerns.

Back in October 2019 a lot of us thought this matter would be closed, with the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, the free trade agreement and swathes of new laws on transitioning fishing, agriculture, product standards and other matters. Now in 2023 we’re still talking about Brexit fatigue. Aren't people sick of Brexit? Are there really new arguments to be made? Do you remember? Everyone was accusing the Brexit Party at that time of over-talking the Brexit question.

Well, the people may have been exhausted, but what a price we paid for that exhaustion, because we gave an 80-seat majority to someone who promised to deliver Brexit. A lot of Brexit Party candidates like myself stood down to give a free pass to Boris Johnson’s Brexit mandate in 2019.
 

So at its heart, what is Brexit and how did we get to where we are today? Brexit is the United Kingdom taking its rightful place amongst 168 other countries in the world that are not a member of the EU. It is not a remarkable situation. It is the default position, that a country has autonomy over its own courts, its laws, trade agreements, working practices, foreign policy and so on. But we're constantly told to the contrary, that the United Kingdom can't survive outside the European Union.

The Conservatives have failed on ambition and on national renewal

Ben Habib, Deputy Leader of Reform UK spoke very eloquently about all of this at the Reform UK Conference 2023, and I’m going to paraphrase some his statements here.
 

Somehow we’re constantly being told that we must be in a dire state because of Brexit, not being members of the EU, even though non-EU exports and EU exports from Britain are at record highs, there are three major new trade agreements, trade negotiations with US states, India, and there are many other positive signals. As Brexiteers our mistake has been to let rejoiners take the default position.

Rejoiners have somehow forced us to justify Brexit. But really we don't have to justify Brexit. Brexit is what it means to be the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was the settled decision of voters in the referendum, despite the onslaught of contrary messages from the globalist blob all around the world, IMF, World Bank, President Obama, the Tory government’s own advice leaflet.
 

What remainers and rejoiners have to prove is that we should go back into that arrangement, but they always make no case for the EU itself. They just threaten us and bully us and tell us, weren't we stupid for voting for an independent country!
 

What we all agree about is that the country has been badly managed, but that's got absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. That's got everything to do with the Conservative parliamentary party, which has an 80-seat majority. So instead of jettisoning the bloated, socialist malign entity that is the EU, the Conservatives continue to slide closer back towards it.

The Conservative Party didn't inculcate aspiration and renewal, it inculcated dependency. It didn't deregulate and cut taxes for growth. It has just perpetrated wealth redistribution from the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown era. The Conservatives even gave up part of our country, by carving out Northern Ireland in the Windsor Protocol, which is perhaps the biggest act of constitutional self harm any of us have experienced in our lifetimes. 

Brexit is simply the default setting
 

So Brexit is blameless. Brexit cannot fail. Brexit is simply about us governing ourselves. Yes the Conservative Party has failed, and they are going to reap the electoral impact of that. In areas like fishing and agriculture and the Northern Ireland situation, we still need to take back control. Reform UK are going to continue to fight to put right those wrongs, to restore the economies of our coastal towns and fishing fleets. And we are going to do it, and we're going to take back control. It’s not right that we pay millions of pounds to France for cooperation on migrant boats crossing the Channel, but French, Spanish, Dutch factory ships and others continue to scrape up our fishing grounds, dredging up the seabed, destroying our marine eco-environment. It is not right that this is the accepted orthodoxy. Our British waters are one of the most important resources we have.
 

The accepted orthodoxy says we're not even allowed to take France’s illegal migrants, that they send us through their waters, back to their shores. They can send their boats to scoop up our fish. But we can't send back the illegal migrants. 
 

There’s a sense of despair for poor little Britain, that we’ve given up on this country. But let’s be clear that’s just a Conservative view, and a Labour view, of Britain. On immigration, we’ve reached the point where the Conservatives (mostly) and Suella Braverman are correct in diagnosing the migrant problem. That in itself is a good start. But we now need a solution. What is the solution to border control? It is the Reform UK policy of reforming our ECHR association, or if necessary leaving the ECHR altogether, and picking up migrant boats and returning them back to their last safe country, which is France.
 

What we must not do is wait for them to come here so that we have all the legal difficulties in deporting them. Border control is a physical process. Remember when we used to have a Royal Navy that protected the United Kingdom?
 

As Suella Braverman rightly said, the current wave of uncontrolled migration is an assault on our nationhood. But we haven't even deployed our resources in the way we should. Border Force is a glorified taxi service. They should all be sacked and replaced with a new Department for Immigration with a new culture and a new focus. Border Force and the RNLI are going into French waters, taking people who are perfectly safe on a dinghy, putting them on their boats. Our government then gives them instant protection under our law, bringing them back to our shores, where we promptly pay £50,000 a year to accommodate them and process their cases.
 

The problem is only going to get worse. And what about getting back to a real asylum system where we can focus our help on women, orphans, people in real war zones and people really fleeing persecution?

The Conservatives are right on the diagnosis, wrong on actions
 

The ECHR has morphed from the admirable organisation that was set up to keep the French and the Germans in harmony in the post-war years. It was set up for a particular set of circumstances but it has become anti-human rights and it has become a political court. It now delivers judgements that prevent nation states from being nation states. And that's what's at stake here. It amounts to an assault on the United Kingdom, both legal migration and illegal migration. It is an attack on our nation state by a foreign court. It's nothing short of that and Suella Braverman was right to describe it like that.

Our nation state and our history are being assaulted on a daily basis We're told that our heritage is defined by our national guilt as slave traders. But those kind of commentators never mention the fact that we were the first country in history ever - at the peak of our power - to abolish the slave trade and then spend the rest of the 19th century policing the high seas to stop other countries from taking part in the vile slave trade.

Between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy, the West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 foreign ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard these vessels. There are the attacks on Winston Churchill and even attacks from the Archbishop of Woke, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. In the real world, Winston Churchill hasn’t suddenly become a white supremacist? But it’s important to state where these attacks from the politically-correct cultural revolution are coming from.
 

They’re designed to destroy our aspiration and create dependency. The war of woke is meant to destroy our self confidence. It's another attack on the nation states, to make us fold back into the globalist super-structures. They don't want you proud. They don't want you self confident. They want an EU morass, and a blob of frightened and dependent people.
 

So yes, we need a parliament and a civil service that really wants to govern and not sub-contract our country to committees in Belgium and Switzerland. This agenda is why we have 6.2 million people now (twice as many as before the pandemic) on Universal Credit and we have a government that doesn’t care about ordinary people.

Britons are increasingly jobless, directionless and concerned about immigration

There were 1.0 million people on Universal Credit in 2018. There are now 6.2 million and we have record-high taxes at levels not seen for 70 years and we have dysfunctional labour force dynamics. Some 2.5 million of those working age people on UC aren't even looking for a job. So when Rishi Sunak gets up in the House of Commons and says unemployment is at a record low, he's lying. Unemployment is only technically at a record low because the government doesn’t measure the people who aren't looking for a job. We need to fix this.

We need to reduce taxes for low-paid workers by raising the personal allowance to £20,000 per year. We need to make really rewarding jobs pay again. It comes back to the question, what is a nation state? What are the important values that we all need to gather around?

It's about a shared culture. It's a shared language. But if you take on lots of immigrants into the system, without even jobs and homes for them, you begin to undermine the nation state and you undermine the hopes and aspirations of people. We've had more net immigration in the last 25 years than we had in all of history up until the current point in time.

And that is what the EU wants, and it’s what the Conservatives have been doing. If you look at the political debate currently in Italy, in France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, it’s all about looking to the European Commission for a solution to the migrant problem. The EU has Frontex, its dysfunctional border agency, but in the EU the control of immigration is chaotic and nation states have almost given up.

The EU is an entity which has allowed freedom of movement, which has literally removed borders from within Europe. So when thousands of migrants land in Italy from Africa, to the Western Balkans, or Greece (with the help of European charities and shady billionaire-backed NGOs), they can just make their way to Calais. They get on a dinghy, apparently with French assistance and British money and then they come here to take advantage of our generosity. This is all an attack on the nation state. And we see that playing out in our economics. We see that playing out in the media and in the culture wars, with for example the shutting down of certain commentators and certain opinions. There’s a common factor that is playing out across our national life
 

There's an all out economic attack on the United Kingdom, and we're perpetrating it ourselves. Yet another dimension of this is the inexorable rmarch towards Net Zero and the punishing plans to deliver on the UN-driven climate obsession and man-made CO2 obsession. It is an unscientific and arbitrary timetable, at a time when people want to return to genuine environmentalism and energy technology that works in the real world. If the Conservatives were genuine in wanting to deliver environmentalism and a managed energy plan, they would have done a lot more to foster development of nuclear and to foster careful development of domestic British shale gas, offshore gas, the new coal and gas technologies that are available.

This is very important because the most inflationary government policy of them all is is Net Zero and it has had a massive impact on the cost of living crisis. It has reached ridiculous proportions, with the Office for Budget Responsibilty estimating the cost of Net Zero at £46.7 billion per year for all of the next 30 years. This equates to the average annual cost per household of £1,660  or £50,400 over 30 years. The Conservatives are only playing with the margins, looking at the coming combustion engine vehicle ban for 2035, and the punishing rules on gas boilers and domestic heat pump systems. It is deeply, deeply damaging and based on questionable climate science at best.

Britons are increasingly socially liberal but not in all aspects

The findings from the British Social Attitudes survey published last month looking at British social trends over the last 40 years found that attitudes towards people who are transgender have become markedly less liberal over the past three years. Some 64% describe themselves as not prejudiced at all against people who are transgender, a decline of 18 percentage points since 2019 (82%). Just 30% of people think someone should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate altered if they want, down from 53% in 2019.

While women, younger people, and the less religious express more liberal views towards people who are transgender, these views have declined across all demographic groups in Britain. Looking at benefits dependency, 19% agree that most people who get social security don’t really deserve any help, down from a high of 40% in 2005. Responses in 2019-2022 are the lowest since the question was first asked in 1987.

Britons are more concerned about poverty

Some 22% of people think that unemployment claimants are ‘fiddling in one way or another’, down from a high of 41% in 2004. People are increasingly likely to perceive poverty in Britain and their definitions of what constitutes poverty have become more generous. 69% of people think there is quite a lot of poverty in Britain, compared with 52% in 2006.

People are now more likely to think that poverty has risen in the past decade, compared with any point since the survey began: 78% say this, compared with 32% in 2006 (a massive increase of 46 percentage points). 39% think someone is in poverty if they have enough to buy the things they need, but not the things most people take for granted. This figure stood at 29% in 2019 and 19% in 2013.

Britons are concerned about social class and opportunities

77% of Brits now say that social class affects someone’s opportunities ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite lot’, up from 70% in 1983.

Over the past four decades, there have been two periods of dramatic change in our attitudes to welfare; negative attitudes increased in the late 1990s and 2000s, while attitudes have softened since 2010. While the first period of change is well understood, being largely driven by changes in the views of Labour Party voters, there is another period of change happening now in the ‘caring middle’ of politics.

So Brits have never before been so concerned about poverty, and a lot of social attitudes are changing. There’s a new nebulous blob of stakeholders now, this other entity at the table, which we're all nodding our heads towards. But all of this is damaging the economy and it is coming from the EU. This is another aspect of life where we are still in the tentacles of the EU. And in the Conservative Party they’ve cancelled the promised ‘bonfire’ of EU regulations, fearing what they call a legislative vacuum. But really that’s just an example of their smoke and mirrors.

As a sovereign country and under the common law system of the UK there's no such thing as a legislative vacuum. We live in a country under common law, where everything is permitted unless it's expressly prohibited. The reason the EU is such a basket case of an economy and why it will never succeed as an economy, is because nothing is permitted unless it's expressly permitted or written down in a Directive somewhere. It needs the laws. It needs legislation because they're not allowed to do anything without it.

Let's take back Brexit and make it work for people

In the United Kingdom, we have a different history. We have never needed a bill of rights or a constitution to state our rights, because our citizens are able to do anything unless it is expressly prohibited or expressly regulated. Our history is about being a nimble independent trading nation and it’s about our tradition of innovation and risk-taking, our businesses, and as a country. And this legislative weight we still carry from the EU is another massive, damaging impact on the economy. 
 

So when the remainers continue to talk about the ‘damage’ done by Brexit, to them it’s all about promoting the EU view of the world. To them it’s necessary to promote us to the EU, to promote EU values. To them everything contrary to that is against their view of the world. But really it is deeply anti-democratic and it is deeply damaging to our economic ecosystem. It is deeply damaging to our cultural makeup, our language. And ultimately, it's deeply damaging to our own self confidence, and that's what we must never allow to happen.

So when it comes to voting and the looking ahead to the 2024 General Election, the public should remember the place we’ve come from as a nation, the journey before and after the Brexit vote. It’s not the Liberal Democrats who are going to rise to the challenge of the globalist orthodoxy and the two main legacy parties. Frankly speaking, when you look at Labour and the Conservatives, on tax, on the economy, on immigration, on energy, and on almost any policy platform, there is really only one party now. And if you keep voting for the same thing, you'll get the same result. The only vote for change is Reform UK.

It is Reform UK that is going to make the British Lion take it’s place again, to return our country to being a force for good in the world. Only Reform UK is going to take Northern Ireland back into the union with Great Britain. Reform UK will stop the boats and return to a genuine asylum system. Reform UK will make you proud of our country, whatever life journey has brought you here.