The Conservatives were elected with an 80-seat majority in 2019 with one big idea — Get Brexit Done. So did we? Well sort of, but there is much more to do.

Brexit has returned sovereignty to the UK — its most important attribute. But it also means we must choose our politicians carefully. They now have control over our laws, money, taxes, trade, transport, farming, fishing, financial services, science and technology, migration, and legislative scrutiny. 

Yet strangely our politicians seem terrified to use many of their new freedoms.

Were they, like Ken Clarke, simply “looking forward to the day when the Westminster Parliament is just a council chamber in Europe”, and so, more than happy to adopt EU regulations and directives without question?

I can’t blame them, most of them were elected expecting all of the big decisions to be made in Brussels. Politicians outside of Europe don’t have this luxury. They know that if they seek public office, they must also come prepared with philosophies and strategies to run a country and be prepared to make all of the decisions. Including decisions unpopular with activists and lobby groups.

The Brexit referendum was won on three big ideas: take back control of our laws, our money and our borders. So how did this go?

(1) Our Laws

Most importantly Brexit has returned sovereignty to the UK’s government and restored UK courts as the supreme arbiters of UK laws. From January this year, UK courts are no longer required to consider ECJ rulings in their decision-making.

Issues that have been outside of our government’s control for decades are suddenly in their hands. Our parliament may even introduce similar legislation to the EU, but that legislation will be debated in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, during this process the Bills may be amended or even defeated. This is not possible for EU members — they must follow whatever directive or regulation is passed down to them. 

Compare the EU’s Digital Services Act to the UK’s Online Safety Bill. Both attempt to control content on the internet — and both have the potential unintended consequence of restricting free speech — but in the UK the Online Safety Bill was debated vigorously in both the Commons and the Lords, resulting in many changes and amendments to the bill. EU member states were not able to do this for their Digital Services Act. 

Going forward I hope more MPs and Lords will embrace this freedom to scrutinise legislation for unintended consequences and tailor laws to suit the United Kingdom. 

(2) Our money

Once, UK budgets had to be approved by Brussels before they were presented to parliament. One of the original tasks of the much-derided OBR was to ensure the UK stayed within the Maastricht spending limits, even though we were not in the Euro or the ERM. Now the UK no longer has to abide by those spending limits.

The UK no longer pays billions of pounds to the EU but keeps all of the money it raises. We no longer pay 80 per cent of our customs duties to the EU, nor a portion of our VAT, nor a contribution based on our Gross National Income — including our black economy — as David Cameron and George Osborne discovered to their chagrin. 

Brexit also allowed us to avoid paying for the EU’s €750 billion Covid Recovery Fund, which was primarily used to rebuild Spain and Italy. And Great Britain, at least, is outside the EU’s State Aid restrictions, although the Windsor Framework has complicated this for Northern Ireland and any company that trades there.

Not only do we no longer have to pay the EU a proportion of our VAT, but our politicians now decide our VAT rates, they can also decide which products should have VAT and which ones should be VAT-free. For years this was an EU decision. We could even replace VAT with a more efficient sales tax if we liked. Or abolish it completely — it does greatly distort the pricing mechanism — although that would require massive cuts to government spending or increases in other taxes. 

So far, our VAT freedom has been lightly used. Our government has timidly removed the VAT on solar panels and heat pumps in Great Britain, unfortunately, the Windsor Framework prevents this from happening in Northern Ireland. While the Labour Party is proposing to use this new freedom to add VAT to private school fees — education and vocational training are exempt from VAT in the EU. 

The UK finally has control over its import duties and import quotas. The EEC was originally mostly a Customs Union, so trade restrictions and tariffs have always been a Brussels competency. 

When the UK left the EU, we immediately removed the thousands of “nuisance tariffs” — tariffs that were below 2 per cent — these simply created more paperwork for importers and raised little money. Effectively just a bureaucratic trade barrier. 

Recently the UK suspended 162 tariffs on goods that the UK does not produce, including concentrated fruit juices, tropical fruit purees, nuts, ambient tofu, dried onions, and other goods used in food manufacturing as well as on some chemicals, metals, plastic seals, leather for making shoes (but not finished shoes) and car parts (but not finished cars) etc. In general, these goods are only a small part of the cost of the finished product, but this suspension will at least reduce manufacturers’ paperwork. And that is always a good thing.

While I would have welcomed the suspension of many more tariffs, this is a step in the right direction. The main point is that, now the UK is in control of its own tariffs whereas before Brexit changing or eliminating tariffs was impossible. Now it is entirely in our control, and the government should be doing a lot more of it.

Besides lowering tariffs, the UK has also been able to negotiate its own trade deals, with whatever country it likes. Those new trade deals include services – now the UK’s largest export sector. The UK can protect its own industries in those trade deals if it wants, but it does not have to protect industries in other EU countries. The ease and speed of bilateral trade deals as opposed to the EU’s protracted trade deal trying to protect the pet industries of 28 countries, has allowed the UK to: 

• roll over the trade agreements we had when we were members of the EU; 
• sign new trade agreements with the EU itself, (we have a tariff-free and quota-free trade deal with the EU, something that no other non EU or EEA country has), as well as with Australia, New Zealand, the CPTPP, Ukraine, and the Eastern and Southern African countries; 
• improve the continuity agreement with Japan; 
• sign a digital trade agreement with Singapore; 
• created our own Developing Countries Trading Schemes; and 
• and we are currently negotiating trade deals with South Korea, Switzerland, India, Israel, Canada, Mexico, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

Quite an impressive list for a Trade Department that didn’t exist five years ago, when the UK was a member of the EU.

(3) Our Borders  

The UK has regained control over its territorial waters, enabling the UK to close part of Dogger Bank to protect seabirds as well as banning bottom trawling in 13 Marine Protected Areas. 

The UK’s fishing industry is gradually regaining control over its fishing grounds. Under the UK EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), 25 per cent of the EU’s quota for fish in UK waters is being transferred to the UK and will be completed by June 2026. After that, mutual access to UK and EU waters will be through licensing for fishing boats and negotiated annually.

The UK now determines who comes into our country legally, where they can work, the minimum amount they must be paid, and immigrants with entry visas for longer than 6 months must pay a health surcharge to use the NHS. 

All of this was impossible when we had to accept the EU’s free movement of people, with or without a job, and give EU nationals free access to UK healthcare and all other social benefits. 

Now EU students who attend UK universities must pay the same fees as non-EU students. This has been a windfall for UK universities, and for UK taxpayers who were effectively subsidising EU students before Brexit. 

And although we presently have a problem with illegal immigrants, so does the EU. Illegal immigrants are also landing on the shores of Spain, Italy and Greece so this problem isn’t due to Brexit. However, if we were still in the EU, the EU’s new Migration Pact would compel us to accept a proportion of these Mediterranean arrivals as well.

And of course, we can now elect a new government that may, or may not, have a better plan to stop the rubber boats.

(4) Other regulations

Additionally, we have made other changes to our regulations that were impossible when we were members of the EU.

We now have freeports that are outside the EU’s State Aid Rules. 

We have removed regulations on consumer goods pricing. 

UK Farmers with more than 30 hectares of land no longer need to grow three different crops. And while their CAP payments for owning land are being phased out, we are subsidising them for environmental land uses. While I and many others disagree with ELS — at least we can now vote for change, while EU farmers can only resort to blocking the roads with their tractors and spraying EU buildings with slurry.

UK scientists can now develop, and UK farmers can now use, gene-edited plants and animals to reduce diseases and lower drug and pesticide use. 

The UK’s financial service industry is no longer restricted by the EU’s double Volume Caps, financial reports on small-cap companies can be distributed without payment and bankers’ bonuses are no longer capped (so we can compete with New York), nor do fund managers have to be paid in fund units.

The UK’s Competition and Market Authority is now solely responsible for UK mergers and acquisitions, rather than the EU making any monopoly decisions based on its effect on the whole EU market, regardless of its effect on the UK.

Nor does the UK have to sit idly by, when the EU gives grants to UK manufacturers to encourage them to move their factories to eastern EU countries.  

5. The strange silence on Brexit benefits and the constant claims about its costs

Many of you may be surprised by this list. These benefits are never mentioned on the BBC, or in the Times, the Economist or the Financial Times. And there are many more regulatory improvements, you will find them on government websites, but they are seldom given any publicity and we rarely hear any of our politicians praise them. Even those politicians who were elected in 2019 to Get Brexit Done, rarely mention Brexit these days. Are they embarrassed by it? They shouldn’t be. We have taken back control of our laws, our money and our borders. Now we have to use those powers wisely.

But while the benefits of Brexit are rarely mentioned, we hear a constant babble about its mythical costs. When Stephen Flynn made the false claim that Brexit had cost the UK £40 billion in lost tax revenue, in last week’s political debate on the BBC, none of the other six candidates refuted this claim nor did the moderator — Radio 4’s Mishal Husain. An organisation called Full Fact, no friend of Brexit, did refute this mythical lost tax on their website but how many BBC viewers would have searched for this information? 

There are numerous myths about the costs of Brexit. The most persistent claim is that the UK’s GDP would be 5 per cent higher if we had stayed in the EU. This is based on an OBR publication, which was itself an average of long-run projections made by thirteen economists, years before the TCA was agreed. Yet it is still held up as a certainty. 

Others have made similar claims about lower UK GDP by extrapolating the UK’s 2009 to 2019 growth rate and claiming that this would have been the UK’s GDP if we had stayed in the EU. But if you did the same extrapolation to French GDP growth between 2009 and 2019, you would get a similar result. Others have invented complex doppelganger models purporting to resemble the UK as a continued member of the EU, but the doppelganger includes many non-EU countries such as the major agricultural exporter New Zealand (the UK is a major agricultural importer) and Dr Graham Gudgin, a Cambridge econometrician, has found that these models are more highly correlated to the US than to any EU country. 

Yet these claims have morphed like Chinese whispers so much that Conservative MP, Tobias Elwood, stated in a television interview that Brexit costs the UK economy 4 per cent of GDP a year. This is patently ridiculous, but the hapless MP was unaware that the original forecast was over 15 years. And the interviewer didn’t correct his mistake.

(6) Conclusion

Brexit is not finished. We need to make much more of our financial and regulatory freedoms and we need to reverse the Windsor Framework which seems to have been designed to disenfranchise 1.9 million UK citizens, without even bothering to ask them how they feel about this, while preventing the rest of the UK from diverging from EU regulations. 

The coming UK election will be the most significant election since 1973. I would urge everyone to vote for the candidate who is prepared to make the most of our Brexit freedoms, whatever party they represent, because unlike in previous elections, this time they will have power over our laws, our money and our borders.

This article is based on a speech delivered at the “Win or Lose: The Strange Survival of Conservatism” symposium hosted by the Danube Institute and New Culture Forum in London on 10 June with support by the International Reagan Thatcher Society