On its fifth anniversary, Brexit is already vindicated

Five years ago today the United Kingdom made a choice, memorably denounced by American media mogul Michael Bloomberg as the “single stupidest thing any country has ever done”: we voted to leave the European Union. Every voice, from every cohort of the establishment, made it clearer than the Book of Apocalypse that Brexit would consign Britain to irretrievable disaster, financial ruin, and global isolation and insignificance – not to mention the traditional plague of locusts and rain of frogs. All members of the elites, all “experts”, united to get in touch with their inner Private Frazer to proclaim: “We’re a’ doomed.”

Does anyone remember Anna Soubry – the Greta Thunberg of Brexit dystopia – who monopolised our television screens so ubiquitously that some people thought she was a BBC commentator? She doesn’t seem to get so much coverage these days. It is a pity, too, that Guy Verhofstadt no longer goes out canvassing with the Liberal Democrats: his presence at Chesham and Amersham could have produced a very different result. Indefatigably, our betters tried to explain to us that while it might be all very well for countries as diverse as Switzerland, Paraguay, Japan, or even Greenland to exist as sovereign states, Britain lacked the capacity for any such ambitious venture into independence.

Apparently, having administered the greatest empire in history, within the memory of some people still living, was an inadequate indication of the UK’s ability to sustain itself without the helpful protection of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and other continental nations we had – again within living memory – either defeated or liberated in war. Do the elites who aspire to control our lives ever pause to consider how the nonsense they spout as orthodoxy sounds to their increasingly sceptical audience? How much authority do people who proclaim that global warming will burn our planet to a cinder unless we stump up thousands of pounds to scrap our gas boilers, and that men and women can change sex at will, command among normal, sane adults?

Precious little, is the answer, and Brexit was the beginning of the political expression of that disillusionment; it will not be the end of it, not by a long chalk. Those who despair that the British public has lost its spirit of independence by knuckling under to Covid lockdown are misreading the situation: a majority of people simply decided, having assessed an infinite variety of opinions online, that there was an acceptable public health case for extreme precautions. That does not mean that the government, once near-universal vaccination has been attained, will be able to continue with quasi-totalitarian controls over people’s lives. The Chesham and Amersham result showed that already there is a political will to challenge government policy in a variety of areas.

The public feels vindicated by Brexit. Nor does that mean a mere 52 per cent of the electorate feels vindicated: after the democratic decision had been made at the ballot box and in the face of outrageous mistreatment of Britain by Brussels, the polls showed a growing consensus accepting of Brexit. Eventually, it boiled down to the scales having fallen from the eyes even of many Remainers, as the EU showed its true colours and its vindictive intentions towards Britain. The British electorate, against all conventional expectations, got this one right.

Remember how Goldman Sachs warned that Brexit would negatively affect its investment in the UK? It has now revealed plans to expand its presence in Britain, launching a UK transaction bank. Similarly, J.P. Morgan is preparing to launch its own digital bank here and has bought the British robo-adviser Nutmeg, in a challenge to established British banks. As for the City imploding, the Square Mile is doing very nicely, thank you.

While the City may have narrowly lost its position as Europe’s largest share-trading hub to Amsterdam, its prospects are very bright, as revealed by a survey from Ernst & Young (EY). Despite the pandemic (not Brexit) having hit financial services badly, Britain attracted the highest number of financial services foreign direct investment (FDI) projects in Europe in 2020, with half of the global investors surveyed saying they planned to set up or extend UK operations over the next year. EY reported that, despite the challenges of recent years, “the evidence points to this not only continuing, but growing in strength, ensuring the UK remains a world leading financial services centre”.

So much for the dystopian Remainer scenario of tumbleweed drifting across the deserted streets of the Square Mile. Indeed, the EU is now beginning to realise the weaknesses of its own position. EU financial services commissioner Mairead McGuinness recently admitted that Brexit had “laid bare” vulnerabilities in the EU’s financial system by exposing its dependence on the City. This claim, of course, is designed to provide a patina of respectability to Brussels’ hard-ball behaviour over important equivalence decisions relating to greater access to its market for UK firms.

The EU is trying to hobble the City – in Eurospeak “we want to limit the concentration of critical infrastructures located outside of the EU” – but that ambition is now clearly doomed to long-term failure. The government is rightly setting its sights on global partners far beyond the EU. John Glen, economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister, told a conference recently that Britain would pursue “deeper dialogue” on financial services, including mutual recognition deals, with trading partners such as Australia, India and Brazil, to help the City “thrive outside the EU”.

The revanchist, scorched-earth policies increasingly being pursued by the EU to punish Britain are doing nothing to enhance its global credit. A leaked EU document has just revealed that the European Commission has been asked to carry out an impact study on the risks of British “cultural imperialism”, due to the predominance of British television dramas on EU television and streaming services. Clearly, the petty protectionists in Brussels are preparing to outlaw Downton Abbey and similar popular dramas polluting European culture.

Yet are these not the same EU apparatchiks who, in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, constantly preached to us through their Remainer surrogates that the European Union was a vast, borderless, multicultural forum of artistic exchange, much superior to the insular, inward-looking Little England that Brexit would create? Last year, however, eight per cent of films and TV series shown in Europe were British-made and that is regarded as a cultural threat by the gatekeepers of the great, open cultural arena that is the EU. Brussels’ stance can only be described as pathetic.

Britain is set to thrive under Brexit; it is only Covid that obscures and confuses the picture. House prices have not collapsed, companies have not stampeded out of the country. With cheap foreign labour less available, British workers are beginning to earn more substantial wages, which is a potent motor of levelling up, though in the short term it does involve an inflationary hazard. The solution to that problem is in the hands of the government: stopping spending like drunken sailors would be a good response. Quality manufacturing is on the increase and Britain is beginning to craft a light but effective regulatory regime for businesses.

For those who hanker after the recent past, a museum of EU dirigisme is available to view in Northern Ireland where, thanks to the sovereignty-negating Protocol, 290 EU regulations are still strangling businesses in red tape. Whatever possessed the government to sign up to this virtual surrender of Northern Ireland to Brussels rule, the Tory MPs in the European Research Group are right to denounce it as “too dangerous to the integrity of the Union”.

With Nicola Sturgeon bleating incessantly about another once-in-a-generation independence referendum on Scottish independence, now is the worst possible time to compromise Northern Ireland’s membership of the United Kingdom. It is time to stop pussy-footing around the bear traps set up by Brussels and Dublin (itself now very obviously a victim of EU duplicity and fiscal voracity) and scrap the Protocol, so that our fellow citizens in Northern Ireland may enjoy the independence for which the United Kingdom opted five years ago today.