Ian Proud on X - "The problem with the 'Russia caused Brexit' hoax, is that it isn't really about Russia, but about the tear-filled liberal regret that Brexit happened and the need to blame someone. Not the voters who, on the basis that many in Westminster consider most working class people to be childish, insufficiently educated and gullible, must have been misled. But the Russians, because Russia is the font of all ill. Let's be clear, what I am not saying is that Russian intelligence doesn't conduct hostile activity against British interests. They do. By the same toke, British intelligence conducts hostile activity against Russian interests. As Larry Johnson @LarrySonar21 put it eloquently when I chatted with his earlier, asking a foreign intelligence agency not to act against the interests of another state is a bit like asking your dog not to lick its balls. We even spy on each other during peace time and, while I am on the subject, we spy on our allies too. Right now we are de facto at war with Russia so, boo hoo if they are doing naughty spying things, because we are too. Whinging about Russian spying is so unbelievably childish. Maybe if we sued for peace, we might each spy on each other a little less and do fewer hurty things. But the idea that Russia put a big effort into affecting the Brexit vote doesn't really bear scrutiny. I was in Moscow during the Brexit vote and practically no one was interested in following what they considered to be UK domestic politics. Even the result of the Brexit referendum barely featured in the newspapers. I almost never got asked about Brexit. No one was interested. As i said, no one at the Embassy was buzzing with speculation that the Russkies had been stirring the pot. It just never cropped up. The general view was that Corbyn had left the field of play meaning Labour never mobilised itself in a meaningful way. We have a tendency to believe that the whole world is desperately fascinated with and concerned by our decision to exit the European Union. They are not. As it happens I was a reluctant remainer at the time of the Brexit vote in 2016. I used to joke that being a British diplomat in Moscow made me less reluctant (just to be clear, I had a very nice life with my family in Moscow). That comment was more about the feeling of community I experienced when flying back through Latvia and the idea of being part of a much larger community. That feeling has now gone. The EU is no longer a community that allows nation states to be sovereign while maximising economic, social and cultural connections with minimal central intervention. If people who voted leave were worried about bureaucrats in Brussels telling us what to do in 2016, you want to take a look at the EU today. It has become and is becoming ever more centralised, wresting more sovereignty from its members and prioritising the political and military at the expense of making ordinary people poorer and less safe. The idea that Britain's economic interests can best be served by rejoining a community suffering mass deindustrialisation, the highest energy costs in the developed world and uncontrolled migration is idiotic and dangerous. The suggestion that we can collectively feel safer by latching ourselves to unelected officials in Brussels who want to break Russia up into smaller constituent parts and take on China next, is frankly terrifying. If the Brexit vote happened again, I would vote to leave. Not because the Russians told me to.. I suspect that most people who voted leave in 2016 would do so again. If @andyburnham wants us to rejoin then the public should have a say. Blaming the Russians just makes him appear every bit as useless as Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May.... jeez who's in charge of our frigging country"
Meme -Ramon Agusta @ramonagusta: ""the Russians swung the Brexit vote" 🤦♂️ #GrubbyBurnham"
LEAVE: £13.4m - Aaron Banks. Wetherspoons, JCB, Dyson
REMAIN: £19.1m - £9m Government leaflet, HM Treasury forecasts, CBI campaign, US President endorsement. UK Universities, European Central Bank, WTO, IMF, UK Local Government, George Soros, TUC & Unions, Japanese government, Irish government, 30 UK newspapers & mags, 2 Former MI5 DGs, 13 Nobel prize winners, Labour, Libdems, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, SDLP, EU Commission, Draghi, Berlusconi, Kofi Annan, WWF, NATO, Asda, BAe, BMW, BT"
J Stewart on X - "This was one of the most PAINFUL CAR CRASH interviews you’ll ever see with Labour foreign minister Stephen Doughty on @GMB about Andy Burnham saying Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum. Susanna Reid grows increasingly frustrated as he refuses to answer her questions, and even Ed Balls eventually tears into him for the “embarrassing waffle”. Doughty is asked again and again about the Prime Minister’s claims but he just keeps ignoring the questions and repeating the same empty line: that Russia has been attempting to interfere with our democratic processes for many years. Susanna tries to force him onto the 2016 vote itself. She asks what Russia actually did, whether it influenced voters, and whether it affected the result. He refuses to give any specifics and just repeats the line. When she asks “Why are you not getting into specifics when the Prime Minister has just got into the specifics?”, he claims Burnham was only speaking more broadly. She keeps pressing. He keeps repeating the line like a robot. She asks if the Prime Minister was wrong.
Doughty: “The PM has been very clear about Russian attempts to interfere in our democratic processes.”
By now Susanna is openly angry and accuses him of “muddying the waters not clarifying them”. He almost laughably says the same thing again. He isn’t listening. He might as well have come on just to read a statement. Susanna points out that if the result of such a huge decision was influenced, the public deserves answers about what the interference actually was. Doughty claims the PM only said “attempted to interfere”. Susanna cuts in immediately: “He doesn’t say ‘attempted to interfere!’” They play Burnham’s actual comments. Doughty goes straight back to the identical line. Susanna tries one final time. Same response. It is at this point that Ed Balls, clearly fed up, lays into him:
“This is EMBARRASSING. It’s really bad for politics when you just blatantly don’t answer the question on something so important and go back to a nonsensical line, which is contradicted by what the Prime Minister just said!” He goes further: “Either answer Susanna’s question or just say I’m not going to. This waffle is embarrassing!”
Doughty: “It’s not waffle at all Ed!” Then repeats the line yet again.
It is waffle, and I never thought I’d say this but well done Ed Balls for bluntly calling him out. It was embarrassing. Andy Burnham should never have said it. We’ve been through all this. Russia did not in any way, shape or form influence the outcome of that referendum. Dragging this nonsense back up is reckless and a disgrace."
A Brexit rebuke from MI5 is the humiliation Burnham deserves - "Andy Burnham’s latest effort to reignite the Brexit debate is starting to look like his first major mistake in office. The head of MI5 has warned that Russia’s “unimpressive” attempts to influence the 2016 EU referendum should not be the cause of further debate in Britain because it would only serve to delight Russian online trolls. This is an embarrassing slap down for the Prime Minister, who seemed to believe he was delivering something of an exclusive when he appeared as guest on The Rest Is Politics podcast at the weekend. Undoubtedly aware of the inexhaustible thirst of his hosts, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, for any titbit that might undermine the 2016 referendum, Burnham announced that on first arriving in Number 10 this summer, he had asked whether Russia had interfered in the vote that resulted in a 52-48 per cent win for the Leave campaign, and received “the clear answer that, yes, there was”. Now the UK’s top spook, Sir Ken McCallum, Sir Ken McCallum, has cautioned against fuelling Russian propaganda efforts, claiming that Vladimir Putin’s online trolls would be “delighted” if the furore caused by the Prime Minister’s comments continued. Sir Ken confirmed that Russia had tried to influence the vote – something that was already public knowledge before Burnham’s guest appearance on the popular podcast – but dismissed the “comparative impressiveness” of its efforts. The security services seem equally unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s relaxed willingness to set this particular hare running, even though, in placing a question mark over the reliability and robustness of the British democratic process, he has merely amplified one of Moscow’s favourite propaganda lines. An army of online commentators, still licking their wounds 10 years after the referendum, were only too happy to reinforce Burnham’s suggestion that the result had been tainted by Russian interference – essentially conceding a major victory to the Kremlin – and should therefore be either discounted or run again. Burnham’s problem, and the Government’s, is that there remains no evidence that such attempts to influence the result were successful. Hours after Burnham’s podcast appearance, Stephen Doughty, a foreign office minister, was touring the TV studios reassuring viewers that this was the case and trying desperately not to appear as if he was contradicting his boss. Which he was. It is unprecedented for MI5 to make such a high-profile and direct intervention in a political debate. No other prime minister in recent memory has had to have his fingers rapped in quite the same publicly humiliating way. But the stakes are too high to avoid it: the integrity of the UK’s domestic democratic process is a vital cog in the propaganda wars with our Russian opponents. Any serious undermining of it, especially without evidence, cannot be allowed to stand, however senior the political figure who kicked it all off."
Burnham faces Red Wall revolt over Brexit reversal
The costs of rejoining the EU are higher than anyone wants to admit - "Ten years ago, the leader of the official Remain campaign – the then prime minister David Cameron – described the Brexit referendum vote as a decision that “lasts for life”. “We make this decision,” he said, “and it’s probably going to be the only time in our generation when we make this decision.” It is impossible to know how many of the nearly 34 million Britons who turned out to cast their vote did so seduced by the promise of settling the Europe question once and for all. But a decade later, the debate seems anything but over... There has been a concerted effort lately by Rejoiners to convince the nation that an EU which has taken every opportunity to punish the UK for daring to vote leave would somehow allow us to return to the club on our terms, opting out of Schengen and the euro. The EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who no longer has the authority to speak for Brussels, has been featured in a British paper, breezily stating that staying out of the euro and Schengen area would be “perfectly possible”. European ministers who do speak for Brussels, however, have declared in general terms that there will be no “cherrypicking of policies” in the UK’s future relations with the EU, and that Britain must not consider itself “an equal partner”. It would seem reasonable to interpret this to mean that, if the UK is allowed to rejoin, it will have to become a full member of the bloc, adopting its currency and visa policy. Alongside the EU’s new “Solidarity Mechanism”, which requires member states to share the burden of asylum seekers arriving in Europe, joining Schengen would likely mean opening up Britain to a whole host of unvetted migrants from around the world, as well as allowing free movement of European citizens, raising serious security concerns. It is hard to imagine joining a European single currency still plagued by structural flaws, meanwhile, would be welcomed by British voters. By Lord Elliott’s calculations, Britain would have to pay £22bn in annual contributions if it rejoined the EU. “In 2020, we paid £17.043 billion with the rebate, which is £21.937 billion today, run through the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. Assuming we got the rebate back, we’d be paying at least £22 billion a year today.”... that is before taking into account the fact that the European Parliament and the Commission are in the midst of negotiating an increase to the EU’s next long-term budget – with the former having voted last year for €100bn more than already proposed by the latter – while looking to introduce new revenue streams to raise the extra funds. “When we can’t even afford to increase defence spending by £4 billion a year, that seems to be an enormous amount of money to give to a foreign bureaucracy”, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg says, as he reminds me that a return to the EU would not only be “extremely expensive”, but would also take us back into the regulatory regime of Brussels. “I think it’s 10,000 more regulations that have come in since we left. We would have all the inflexibility that the EU has.” The crippling financial burden which would accompany an EU membership should alarm us all. But for a Brexit Britain only beginning to reconnect with its trailblazer spirit, it is the prospect of being strangled by Brussels’ compulsion for overregulation which may be an even greater threat. Sir Jacob tells me: “We have enormous opportunity in nuclear fusion because we regulate it differently from nuclear fission. The EU, on the precautionary principle, thinks it’s all the same and is lagging behind.” The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported in May that “ten fusion companies in Europe have issued a joint letter to Brussels demanding urgent action to remove the regulatory shackles before Europe is shut out of the global fusion race”, such is the desperation among innovative industries which rely on a nimble regulatory framework in order to succeed. Artificial intelligence is another industry which has benefited from a light-touch regulatory approach. More AI companies have been founded in the UK per capita since 2020 than anywhere else in Europe, with Britain now being “home to the second most Quantum companies in the world”, the Government declared in March. Sir Jacob holds the view that nuclear fusion and AI are the two industries which are going to dominate economics in the 21st century. “If we’re in the EU, we’re out of business.”... The Labour Party made a promise in its 2024 manifesto: “There will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement”. Yet, since assuming power, senior members of the Government have equivocated over this commitment. It is becoming increasingly difficult to take Labour for its word on Brexit. Ten years ago, the people of this country trusted a Remainer establishment when it agreed to hold a referendum and promised to implement the result. What followed was a decade of machinations to derail Brexit at every possible turn: from Westminster and Whitehall’s refusal to prepare for an orderly departure, to Sir Keir Starmer’s clandestine meetings with the EU leadership, effectively undermining Britain’s position, to the May administration’s disastrous negotiations and, finally, Labour’s creeping climbdown and failure to honour its manifesto promise. What is now at stake is far more than the future of Brexit: it is the future of our democracy itself."
The Channel illegal migrant crisis can’t be blamed on Brexit - "A report by Migration Watch, updated in 2019, recorded the dramatic decline of the system’s effectiveness from the UK’s perspective in the years before Britain left the EU, with figures revealing “that the balance has shifted since 2015, when 131 people were transferred to the UK, against 510 people who transferred out”. Using Home Office numbers, the report found that “while there were a total of 676 returns of asylum seekers from the UK to other European countries under the rules in 2016 and 2017, 1,019 asylum seekers were transferred to the UK”. “The truth is, we were a net receiver of migrants,” Sir Jacob said as he shared the numbers from 2018, when the inflow to the UK was nearly six times the outflow. That year, the UK received 1,940 requests to take people, and took 1,215, accepting 63 per cent of the applications. In contrast, Britain made 5,510 applications to remove people, of which only 4 per cent or 209 were accepted. “The Dublin regulations were a joke.” It is difficult to quarrel with Sir Jacob’s conclusion... “So our requests to get people out were refused almost invariably, whereas the overwhelming majority of requests for us to take people, we accepted the Dublin regulations, increased immigration in the United Kingdom.” Sir Jacob’s view that these “were not a serious means of protecting our borders” is shared by industry experts and is well documented. Tony Smith CBE is a former director-general of the UK Border Force. During his 40-year career at the Home Office, he also served as the regional director for London and the South East in the UK Border Agency. In 2021, when Parliament was debating the Nationality and Borders Bill, Mr Smith told the public bill committee that the Dublin Convention “certainly did not work with France even when we were in the EU. In fact, we were in the EU when some of the boats started coming. They still would not take anybody back because it relied on a flawed policy framework.” It would appear that some Europeans agree with Mr Smith’s assessment of these regulations, even if Remainers continue to mourn our loss of access to them. Distilling the basic problem with Dublin from the European nation’s perspective, Pietro Galeone of the Labor and Social Policy Unit at Bocconi University in Italy, wrote in 2023: “First of all, several non-border states receive more demands for asylum than those on the border. Second, the distribution of asylum seekers across Member States does not follow the rule book.” The impracticality of the system is also well-documented, with a report from CIDOB, a Barcelona-based think tank, noting that “most applicants seek asylum in a different country to the one in which they arrived”, defying the basic tenet of Dublin that “[i]t should not matter which country you flee to”, as articulated in 2012 by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström. And so is the inefficiency of it. “If Dublin is inefficient in preventing asylum applications in a country other than that assigned, it is just as inefficient in fulfilling transfer requests between member states,” the report found. To illustrate the point, it provides an example from 2013, when of a total of 76,358 transfer requests, 56,466 were accepted by the receiving countries. However, only 20 per cent, or 15,938 transfers, were carried out... As predicted by those advocating for Brexit 10 years ago, whatever the problem, the solution which Brussels finally arrives at will always result in further loss of sovereignty for individual member states. But why, despite freeing itself from the EU, has Britain failed so miserably to take control of its borders? Not just the illegal Channel crossings, but legal immigration has soared under the leadership of those who promised to take back control of the country. “That was the fault of the Conservative government, of which I was a part.” Sir Jacob responded unflinchingly. “It was not a consequence of Brexit.” “The problem was that post-Covid there was a feeling that people had retired early. They had got used to furlough, they weren’t going back to work, and that there were going to be labour shortages across the economy. “And the way to fill those was with migrant labour. And we therefore took very large numbers of migrant labour under easy terms, plus their dependents. And so for a couple of years, migration was utterly out of control.” Having delivered such a candid assessment of his own party’s failings in power, what advice would Sir Jacob offer the Labour Government to address the Channel crisis? “Pull out of the Convention on Human Rights, pull out of the refugee convention, forget internationalism, govern the country.” It is, however, very much a consequence of Brexit that the only legislators responsible for the current immigration crisis are based in Westminster. If Brexit means anything, it is to have the freedom to make our own choices. That includes the freedom to make wrong choices too, on our own terms, not dictated by Eurocrats, secure in the knowledge that the people who govern over us do so only because we have entrusted them with that right. A right which can be taken back if the terms no longer apply."
Yes, Brexit did deliver an extra £350m a week for the NHS - "On the eve of the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, the Labour Party posted the picture of a red bus on its X account. Across it was printed: “Remember the £350 million a week for our NHS? You can’t trust Farage.” The accompanying caption read: “He’s got a track record of selling the British people false promises.” There were two problems with this post. First, it wasn’t Nigel Farage who was responsible for the promise of £350m a week for our NHS made during the Brexit campaign. Second, even if the claim had been made by the then Ukip leader, it would in fact have served as a rare reminder of a politician delivering on a promise several times over... On Oct 28, 2018, Philip Hammond, chancellor in the Theresa May government, presented his last Budget to the country before we officially left the EU. “By 2019, we were giving the NHS an extra £350m a week, and it’s gone up since then, of course,” Lord Elliott recalled... While we were a member of the EU, there had to be a Brexit pot, out of which the weekly £350m gross payment would be made to Brussels. It was a political choice which committed British taxpayers to this arrangement. In the same way, it was Brexit which allowed Westminster to make the political choice to divert those funds towards the NHS in accordance with our national priorities."
Project Fear predicted a Brexit apocalypse for the City. It never happened - "In the spring of 2016, the Policy and Resources Committee of the City of London Corporation made an historic declaration. By 17 votes to three, its members had decided that the governing body of the Square Mile would support the United Kingdom remaining a member of the European Union in the upcoming referendum. In his attempt to explain the City’s extraordinary decision to adopt and express a corporate view on one of the most politically charged debates of our times, the then chairman of the committee Mark Boleat, since knighted, highlighted two significant factors. One would seem to serve as a reminder of the strength of the establishment’s anti-Brexit stance. This was not a party political issue, Sir Mark said: “Wherever possible we support the Government of the day, and on this issue we would be supporting the [Conservative] Government in a view that is shared by the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National parties.” The second is a testament to the success of what Brexiteers remember as the Remain campaign’s “Project Fear” in convincing Britain’s financial services industry that it was crucial economically for the country to retain its membership of the EU. Prime minister David Cameron had declared Brexit “the self-destruct option for the country”, and chancellor George Osborne had predicted a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years. Likening it to the anxiety gripping the Square Mile back in the 1990s when it became clear that the UK would not be joining the euro, City sources remembered “an atmosphere of unease”, as panic set in. One of the most high-profile interventions from within the industry came from JP Morgan. Chief executive Jamie Dimon initially warned of his bank cutting 4,000 jobs in the event of the UK leaving the EU. After the vote and during the Brexit negotiations, the warnings escalated as Mr Dimon revised his job loss estimates up to a more dramatic 16,000 “if we can’t find reciprocal recognition of rules” with the EU, posing “a real threat to the future success of London as a financial centre”, as reported by the BBC. The JP Morgan boss did not shy away from suggesting that his pessimism over reciprocal recognition rules being negotiated between London and Brussels was due to the EU’s wish to punish the UK, with “a lot of people” being “mad with the Brits for leaving and want[ing] their pound of flesh”. London’s loss was going to be Paris, Frankfurt or Berlin’s gain, as European leaders such as the “new darling of Davos”, the then 39-year-old French president, Emmanuel Macron, dialled up the charm offensive. Mr Dimon’s instincts were partially correct: our pound of flesh was indeed claimed. The UK has not been granted broad reciprocal recognition of its rules by the EU, despite us granting our own recognitions more flexibly in some areas. Post-Brexit UK-EU financial services cooperation continues to rely on a combination of limited equivalence and regulatory dialogue. The punishment is also reflected in the fact that Britain has been granted fewer equivalence decisions (which reduce regulatory complexity for British-based firms operating in the EU) by Brussels than other third countries like the US. The EU also retains the right to withdraw equivalence with notice. But Mr Dimon was wildly off the mark on his predicted exodus of City workers. “At the time of Brexit, CityUK endlessly cited their study forecasting Brexit would mean 75,000 job losses”, remembers Lord Lilley, the Conservative grandee who, as Mrs Thatcher’s trade and industry secretary, oversaw Britain’s entry into the Single Market. “It didn’t happen. There are now more people employed in financial services in Britain than before Brexit.” Certainly, the predictions of a collapse in the numbers of financial services jobs did not become reality. Indeed, JP Morgan is reported to be one of the top employers to have “ramped up efforts to hire workers in the year after Brexit”. According to research by recruiter Morgan McKinley and data-analytics firm Vacancysoft, finance firms in England and Wales “tried to hire just over 87,000 workers [in 2022], the highest level recorded by the two organisations and up more than 27 per cent on 2021”. In April, it was reported that JP Morgan was returning some jobs from Paris to London, having bulked up its French operations after Brexit. The bank employs 13,000 staff in London. It is unclear how many of its 1,000 Paris-based employees are moving to London, but the bank has announced plans to build a new 3-million-square-foot tower in London, resulting in a projected £10bn to be injected over the next six years into the local economy. Goldman Sachs, a City giant named in Sir Mark’s speech as among those urging the UK to remain in the EU, has invested £1bn in its new headquarters in Brexit Britain. London also remains a leading global centre for financial technology, which accounts for 38 per cent of our “unicorns” – startups projected to be worth more than $1bn in a few years. It was reported last year that London bred more unicorns than Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam combined. Placed fifth in the global league table, London is behind only San Francisco, New York, Shanghai and Beijing, with “the combined value of British unicorns tripling from $54bn in 2020 to $172bn in 2024”. It is a small wonder that “the City has done an about-turn and successfully lobbied the government to exclude financial services from dynamic alignment with EU law in the planned reset,” said Lord Lilley. Ten years on from Brexit, London has bolstered its status as a global financial centre, diversifying beyond the EU. “City firms welcome Britain taking back control of our law,” said Lord Lilley. “They benefit from the Wholesale Markets Review, Listing Overhaul, bonus cap removal, and, not least, the competitiveness objective for our regulators, but, above all, escaping the never ending stream of new EU regulations.” It was JP Morgan analysts who had mocked Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans, declaring, a “unicorn with a lick of paint is still a unicorn.” Some unicorns, it transpires, are worth pursuing."
No, Brexit has not sent Britain to the back of the queue for free trade deals - "Readers will remember that there was a persistent effort to present Britain’s aspiration of developing a trade strategy independent of Brussels as a hankering for a lost empire. It is as though the concept of two countries willingly entering into a mutually beneficial partnership as equals had been erased from the Europhile subconscious. Which was exactly the sentiment Peter Mandelson – at that point yet to be ennobled or disgraced for the third time – expressed in a Radio 4 interview later in 2017. Britain’s departure from the EU, the prominent Remainer lamented, would leave us “jousting for access to the Single Market with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the world”. The disdain for any country outside the hallowed Single Market club is a testament to the EU’s own imperialist interpretation of trade. “There were many people who were convinced that Britain, outside the European Union, would be a desperate and impoverished mendicant, that we would be going from embassy to embassy on our knees, pleading to have British goods sold in their markets,” Michael Gove, now Lord Gove, recalled. Even as late as Autumn 2020, we were being mocked for aiming too high despite our apparent lack of “clout”. A European commentator decreed that “Brexit Britain is fast becoming Billy No Mates, touting for deals left right and centre”. And yet, by July 2023, the UK had signed the accession protocol to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the CPTPP, acquiring closer trading relations with countries ranging from Japan and Singapore to Canada, Chile and Peru, via Australia and New Zealand. The Australian deal, as part of the UK’s accession to CPTPP, merits a special mention as the first trade agreement negotiated from scratch after Brexit. The Japan deal, on the other hand, was an example of modifying an existing treaty. While it was largely based on the Japan-EU deal, post-Brexit we were able to “secure better access for UK goods than was the case under the EU”, according to Lord Gove. With the UK becoming the 12th member of a trade block with 11 dynamic economies, the CPTPP represented 14.4 per cent of the world’s GDP on 2024 data... In May, “Billy No Mates Britain” became the first G7 country to conclude negotiations on a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council. And what of India, the country we were told had humiliated the prime minister of a weakened and isolated Britain? It appears that Mr Dalrymple might have either overestimated the strength of the South Asian nation’s “very bitter memories of British rule” or underestimated its pragmatism: easy mistakes to make for devotees of a resentful and ideological EU. Having commenced negotiations in 2022, the UK signed a trade deal with India in July 2025. The EU, too, struck its own agreement the following year, after “nearly two-decades of stop-start negotiations”, as the Indian press reported. It is difficult to tell whether President Barack Obama’s threat to Britons during his UK visit – barely two months before the referendum – that a Brexit vote would send us to the “back of the queue” for trade deals with his country helped the Remain case. Critics of the then president suggested at the time that the boorish pronouncement was intended to mask his embarrassment at failing to strike a deal with the EU. Happily, a new president at the White House appeared to break the spell for both the UK and the EU. Last year, Britain was transported to the front of the queue. It became the first country to strike a deal with the US following President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, with an effective 10 per cent tariff rate, the equal lowest of any country, illustrating the flexibility the UK now has in deciding and negotiating its own trade policy. Subsequent events, and Mr Trump’s rapidly changing tariff threats, haven’t substantially altered that picture. “The key thing about leaving the European Union is that it creates possibilities,” Lord Gove told me. Britain’s landmark defence partnership with Australia and the United States exemplifies this point. Along the way, in autumn of 2021, the three countries came together to form Aukus, an “enhanced trilateral security partnership”, with a view to sustaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, focusing in its initial stages on “cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and additional undersea capabilities”. That leaving the EU had “liberated Britain to make the right decisions in our interests”, as Lord Gove put it, is something which the current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, also understands well, even if party politics prevents her from acknowledging it. As she attempted to steer the economy through the prolonged crisis in the Middle East, Ms Reeves found a lifeline in her ability to cut “tariffs on over 100 different foods sold in supermarkets” to ease the pressure on households. It is a direct consequence of Brexit that Britain has regained its independence to set its own trade policy, according to its own needs, unburdened by the interests of 27 other disparate economies."
