Sir John, Lord Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.
The ten year anniversary of the famous EU referendum vote will be used by the government as a new opportunity to talk down Brexit.
They will blame the public for voting the wrong way as they see it.
They will capitulate to strong EU negotiating in a damaging and expensive so called Reset.
The EU sees the PM as weak and a good source of new tax revenue for their cash hungry bureaucracy. Ministers are becoming more and more negative about Brexit whilst dumping their firm Manifesto pledges to keep us out of the single market, the Custom Union and freedom of movement. They knew they had to promise those important things to get elected. They think they can get away with undermining them now in office, assuming us the public to be too stupid to see what they are doing. Anything the EU wants they will get. The PM still has not even secured his promised freer movement for musicians!
Their idea of Reset includes creeping alignment with all the rules and taxes of the single market, introduced sector by sector as with the planned SPS food deal, the acceptance of the EU carbon tax and emissions scheme and the planned civil aviation regulatory legislation. It will include free movement for many people under 30 under a so called Youth Opportunities scheme. It will involve the UK setting up a parallel tariff scheme based on carbon content and prices to be imposed on non-EU goods. These are wide ranging changes to get us back into the position of a rule taker and a tax payer to the EU.
This government wants us to be an EU colony.
It so lacks ideas of how to promote growth and good UK regulation; it wants to just copy the failed system of the continent.
This is a system which generates low growth or no growth for its members , falling further and further behind the USA. This century the US has grown twice as fast as the EU. Today GDP per head in the US is exactly double the low level of the EU average. Why do the UK government want us hitched to a proven failed system, with too many damaging regulations, high taxes and charges and an anti-business and anti-innovation ethos? Both the EU and the UK are becoming digital colonies of the US, dependent for much of what we do on the seven US technology giants to govern our businesses, our entertainment, our social media and the rest. EU regulation and taxes mean Europe has lost out on the phenomenal rise of the internet mega corporations. The US is currently getting quotes for three new trillion dollar companies whilst the UK and the EU have none.
We should celebrate Brexit.
It has delivered something beyond price, the right to make our own laws, set our own taxes and be a global influence . We have regained our vote and voice at the World Trade Organisation, signed trade deals with India and the TPP which the EU did not do for us and took our own approach to secure the first covid vaccine when the EU managed none. We have saved the massive membership payments and got back the surrendered tax revenues we used to pay them.
We have put far more than the sum on the bus into our NHS.
The Reeves budget would have a massive new black hole if we were to go back in.
She will find even the surrogate Reset will be expensive and she will need to put our taxes up to pay the costs.
The government have given away about £6bn of fish over the next 12 years. They have signed up to Erasmus, a worse student scheme than Turing that will cost ten times as much. There will be large fees to join parts of their single market in one sided deals that help their sales to us much more than our exports to them. Tying us into their carbon tax scheme means even dearer energy prices, with more factory closures and job loses to follow.
Brexit has enabled us to cancel tariffs on 24 per cent of our imports where we are importing things we cannot make or grow for ourselves.
This means lower prices for consumers.
It has left us free to take VAT off green products and female hygiene items. It has meant we dodge the huge build-up of EU debt. If we had stayed in, we would have had to pay our share of costs of the Euro 800 bn they are now borrowing. We have escaped thousands of new laws which has helped our technology companies do a bit better than the EU ones. Ironically it has allowed this government to use the freedom to pursue some less sensible policies, including the VAT on private schools and the massive subsidies to an ailing Chinese owned steel company.
As we approach the tenth anniversary, we need to make clear that we have only been out of the EU for five years, not ten.
We need to constantly refute the lies from the government that we have lost 4 per cent of GDP by exit.
We know the outcome so we do not need to rely on these inaccurate longer term old forecasts that they distort and misrepresent.
Since 2016 the UK economy has grown by a little bit more than the leading EU economies that stayed in the EU. We have not grown as fast as the US because we failed to change the EU laws and taxes on exit to give us US stye growth. We opted with the EU for ultra dear energy, leading to de industrialisation. We deliberately have run down one of our most productive and tax paying industries, oil and gas production. We have diverted far too much capital to intermittent renewable power giving us electricity four times the US price. The alleged 4 per cent hit from Brexit to GDP was an OBR forecast that over 15 years we would grow 0.25 per cent less fast than staying in.
So they never claimed we would lose 4 per cent of our existing GDP from Brexit.
It was always a nonsense forecast as our productivity growth will depend on the policies followed and the taxes imposed between now and 2035. It is not being determined by Brexit.
Even the government secretly recognises we have not lost 4 per cent of GDP over Brexit, We still have tariff free trade with them and it is still in big deficit as it always was in the EU. We are much more the customer than the supplier, so they should be paying us to have a close trading arrangement, not the other way round. The government thinks there would be a tiny gain from their Reset, not a sudden 4 per cent leap forward. In practice the Reset will be another small negative on our growth rate and another big hit on our budget with all the charges and costs they impose.
Be proud if you voted to leave the EU.
It was the right call.
We now need the government to believe in it, and to use the freedoms we got back to our benefit. There are so many opportunities if only we would cut tax rates and remove damaging regulations. Going back in would be ruinously expensive and would lower our growth rate with all the extra regulatory and tax burdens it would impose.