Eight years ago today, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The British people collectively decided that it was time to reclaim our islands’ sovereignty. It was the right decision then – and it remains the right decision now.
It is too often claimed that Brexit has been a failure. That is quite simply not the case. The UK has signed individual new trade deals with Australia and New Zealand which would not have been possible while we were still a member of the EU. We are joining up with the fast-growing economies of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, offering vast future opportunities compared with tying ourselves wholly to the sluggish welfarist economies of old Europe.
We once more have control over our own agricultural policy, being able to offer a better deal for farmers and consumers and allowing us to insist on higher welfare standards than we could as members of the bloc.
As Boris Johnson and Ben Wallace’s crucial support for Ukraine from the very start of Russia’s full-scale invasion showed, Britain can now maintain a truly independent foreign policy, putting our own interests first.
It is true that Brexit’s opportunities have not been exploited to their full. The UK remains a high-tax, high-regulation economy. Our borders remain much more open than many of those voting Leave would have hoped.
But we have regained something of immeasurable value by leaving the EU. It is the ability once more to make our own decisions – even if that means, on occasion, making our own mistakes. When we were a member, control over our borders, trade policy, regulation, agriculture – to name but a few areas of Brussels encroachment – was no longer in the hands of our parliament but rather in those of an unaccountable, opaque machine which we could not hold to account.
The Brexit decision was not a vote about favouring one model of governing Britain over another, but a vote about who governs Britain.
After our general election on July 4, we are likely to know who will be prime minister for the coming years on the morning of July 5. The results of the elections to the European Parliament were declared on June 9, but no one can yet say whether Ursula von der Leyen will be reappointed president of the European Commission and who will be appointed to the other top EU positions.
It may take until September for this to be confirmed, through horse trading behind closed doors by national leaders and between the alphabet soup of political groupings in the Strasbourg parliament. This is not real democracy, merely a pretence.
Inevitably, since we left the EU the “ever-closer union” juggernaut has moved remorselessly on. We have escaped the bloc’s Green New Deal and its Nature Restoration Law, threatening to decimate farming and generating angry protests in much of Europe.
Remainers liked to claim that Europe’s politics was more grown up than ours, but we have seen consensus implode against a populist backlash across Europe. The French centre is dying; the country’s politics is becoming a battle between hard Left and hard Right. In Germany, the populist AfD, with its worrying xenophobic undertones, is now the second party.
Brexit has not achieved everything we might have hoped for, but we have reclaimed our democracy and we have taken back control. We will still make mistakes, but they will be our own mistakes. And that’s worth celebrating.