What was Brexit all about, and has it 'worked'?
'We're not for keeps in the Common Market.' — The Rt Hon. Enoch Powell, MBE
The Rt Hon. Enoch Powell once said a year after Britain’s first referendum on membership in what was then the Common Market: ‘The battle over Britain’s national existence and parliamentary independence is a battle which will be fought through to the bitter end, however long it lasts.’ And right he was.
Around seven and a half years ago (or in other words, a political lifetime ago), the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. I can remember the scores of my classmates then listing off a plethora of goods which we would no longer be able to import, or the myriad economic woes which Britain was to inherit. I rubbished them then, and I rubbish them now. In this brief article, I will explain (1) why Britain was right to leave the European Union and (2) how Brexit is ‘going’, and how it can ‘go’ better.
The main advantage, as we are told, of belonging to the European Union was that we enjoyed freedom of movement of persons, goods, and services. Were the European Union to include only Western Europe in this arrangement, I would tend to agree. But the mass influx of Eastern European immigrants during our membership of the EU led to the undercutting of British wages; I will expand upon this point later, but I mean to say that there was a certain advantage of belonging to the European Union. It was also known that, in the short-term, Britons would have to undergo more paperwork and a difficult period of transition, which we are currently going through or about to finish going through, with the return of a devolved government to Northern Ireland.
In order to vote to leave the European Union, then, there must have been certain benefits that outweighed what we were giving up by leaving. They are as follows:
The United Kingdom would be able to negotiate free trade agreements with other countries that are tailored in a specific way to the needs of the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom would be able to have complete control over its borders and immigration policy.
The United Kingdom would be freed from burdensome and excessive EU regulations (more than 60% of laws made in the United Kingdom at the time of Brexit came from the EU).
The United Kingdom would no longer be obliged to pay £350 million per week to the European Union.
Above all, the United Kingdom would once again be a fully sovereign nation, no longer ceding to a foreign parliament the power to overrule laws made by parliament.
If you will, please permit me to run with number five for a moment, for it was the most important factor of all, from which all other factors flowed. The biggest problem with the European Union was not that it was a mere trade bloc, but that it was a political union whose laws and regulations had precedence over national ones. We are not talking merely of laws assuring that too many chemicals, pesticides, or additives are used in food, but we are talking of laws and regulations ranging from the absurd prohibition on bananas that are too bendy to banning companies from advertising water as fighting dehydration. The pure volume of laws was such that, at the end of last year, around 600 EU laws were able to be scrapped by parliament. It is a far cry from the 4,000+ that may be repealed, but it is a start.
A country which is not in complete control of its own laws ceases to be a fully independent country. This is why Enoch Powell saw the battle to leave the Common Market not merely as an economic battle to be waged, but as one for the survival of Britain’s national independence. He believed that it was simply not in the nature of Britons to cede control over their own laws to a foreign parliament, and he was right.
Either we admit that we are seeking an ever-closer political union leading to some kind of superstate, or we abandon the political project. Those who seek to chart a middle way are in for a shock.
Returning back to the list in order, the United Kingdom has been largely successful in procuring free trade deals with other countries. In addition to a free trade agreement agreed with the EU, the United Kingdom has procured new trade deals with Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Japan. We are now also members of the CPTPP trade area, which gives us free trade with Mexico, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, and other countries. In other words, Brexit has been a success from this point of view.
Immigration was another key factor. Net migration was, and is, far too high. Leaving the European Union returned to parliament full authority over the laws concerning immigration and naturalisation of aliens in the United Kingdom. The following diagram shows that more EU citizens have left the United Kingdom than have entered it (i.e., there has been net emigration) for the past few years. This is a good thing, because the United Kingdom is full.
Immigration was and is a huge problem, as we began to receive less and less high-skilled French or German immigrants, and more and more low-skilled immigrants, primarily from Eastern Europe. This immigration, in large numbers, undercuts the wages of British workers and depresses them in the long-term. A business which relies on paying its workers an amount on which one cannot live in this country ought not to survive, even if that salary makes one very wealthy in a foreign country.
But what is well known is the abject failure of the government to control non-EU immigration. This is not, however, a failure of Brexit, but of the government. The key point to distinguish is this: the possession of a power and the exercise thereof are two distinct things, and from a poor exercise of a certain power does not follow the conclusion that the possession thereof is a bad thing, or to be despised.
The same thing can be said also of the burden of EU regulations and of the payments which we send to the European Union. Although we are paying off a financial settlement to the European Union still, we will save valuable money in the long-term that can be used here in our own country.
In order to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to us by our new-found independence as we recover from the aftermaths of the various government-imposed lockdowns, we would do good to seek trade agreements with countries such as Argentina, who have strong anti-Communist and anti-China governments, in order to build up a global anti-China bloc, and we would do good also to diverge from the EU in terms of financial regulations in order to boost London’s competitivity as a global financial hub. But above all, what must first be done is the immediate halt of all further immigration to the United Kingdom, save for exceptional circumstances.
Brexit has been a success in that the United Kingdom now has full power to govern herself, to make laws, and to control her borders. We must now take full advantage of this power by leaving the European Court of Human Rights and by, above all, making laws that benefit the people of our island kingdom and by properly controlling our borders.
Britannia now enjoys the power to govern herself, she must now govern herself well, as simple as that may sound: Anglici, gubernate bene!