Albie Amankona is a Broadcaster, Financial Analyst and political activist.
The Conservative Party is currently trapped between two equally delusional political fantasies on Europe. On one side, the blinkered ideologues of Reform UK continue to peddle the absurd fiction that Brexit has been a pristine triumph with zero downsides. On the other side, Labour and the obsessive Rejoin lobby insist that throwing ourselves back into Brussels’ embrace will magically cure all of Britain’s structural woes. Both are selling snake oil, and it is high time Conservatives embraced a cold, hard dose of reality.
I am no longer a Brexiteer, nor am I a Remainer — I am a patriot.
I do not care about the theological factionalism of 2016; I simply care about restoring our nation to economic prosperity and growth, bringing migration down to low and strictly controlled levels, rebuilding cultural cohesion, upholding uncompromising law and order, and guaranteeing national security. From that cold, patriotic perspective, Brexit was ultimately a colossal waste of time. But precisely because I recognise that fundamental truth, I know that wasting the next decade trying to crawl back into the European Union would be an equally futile betrayal of our national interest.
Looking back at the apocalyptic forecasts of the Remain campaign and the starry-eyed promises of the Leave camp, only one objective conclusion can be drawn: EU membership was never the primary driver of British destiny that either side claimed. The post-Brexit economic boom and halt to migration promised by Leave zealots never materialised, but neither did the immediate economic and social Armageddon prophesied by Remainer doom-mongers.
The plain truth is that Britain’s long-term prosperity, productivity, immigration crisis, and institutional decay have precious little to do with whether we sit inside or outside the European Union. Very little has fundamentally changed. EU membership was vastly oversold, and so was Brexit.
Recognising this reality is vital if Conservatives are to avoid walking straight into Andy Burnham’s Brexit trap. Burnham knows that Kemi Badenoch recognises her route back to Number 10 cannot run solely through the Reform leaning Red Wall; it must also win back the Blue Wall, which fell largely to the Liberal Democrats and Labour.
Figures on the Left are eager to frame the Tories as anti-business zealots who view any deal reducing trade friction with Europe as a betrayal, calculating that this will alienate moderate, prosperity-focused voters in those southern heartlands. If the Conservative Party wants to retain its crown as the natural party of business and win back those voters, we must not fall into the trap of claiming that greater EU market access is an evil.
While I do not wish for us to rejoin the Single Market or Customs Union, it is a simple matter of fact that smoother market access is something British enterprise largely supports. Denying economic reality to appease dogmatists does not make us principled; it makes us look economically illiterate to the very wealth creators we rely on.
Such an approach will also help figures like James Cleverly, Festus Akinbusoye or Sara Gezdari kick Sadiq Khan and Labour out in London. Capitalising on the capital’s dynamism requires pragmatic solutions, not head-in-the-sand isolationism that hands urban seats to Labour and the Liberal Democrats on a silver platter.
In a volatile, multipolar world where American backing can no longer be taken for granted, isolationism is pure folly. We must work with the EU where it benefits Britain, and diverge ruthlessly where it does not. We cannot afford to waste the next decade waging an ideological holy war to rejoin an institution that will not fix our underlying problems, nor can we allow Reform UK to define conservative policy with their unserious posturing.
Yet, instead of capitalising on our independence, former Conservative Home Secretaries like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak handed the country a bitter irony: they abolished European freedom of movement only to replace it with a vastly inferior, higher-volume migration system.
The old system, for all its flaws, brought in young Europeans who came to work, study, and contribute for a few years before returning home, usually travelling alone and making a net contribution to our public purse. Under the watch of Conservative ministers, we swapped that for a massive influx from developing nations, bringing far higher numbers of permanent settlers accompanied by large groups of dependents, who on average contribute significantly less economically than culturally similar European workers. That was not taking back control; it was swapping a somewhat functional arrangement for Boriswave.
While Reform UK, filled with Boris and his eponymous wave’s midwives, contents itself with shouting simplistic slogans and pretending no economic trade-offs exist, serious Conservatives must deliver real solutions. We do not need to restore full freedom of movement to act in our national interest. We should pursue greater reciprocal mobility with Europe, in direct exchange for superior trading terms and deeper security ties.
A genuinely Conservative strategy must combine pragmatic European engagement with a muscular, unapologetic approach to border security and state resources. On illegal migration, we must end the legal merry-go-round by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and establishing a robust, deterrence-based third-country removal plan, akin to the Rwanda framework, to process and deport illegal arrivals.
To restore law and order at the border, we should institute mandatory deportations for foreign criminals, significantly increase the time required to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), and immediately strip state benefits access so that welfare and free NHS treatment is strictly reserved for British citizens.
Finally, we must completely restructure non-EU migration by imposing significantly tougher visa criteria across the board, whilst maintaining streamlined, high-skilled pathways exclusively for natural allies such as Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States.
It is time to bury Brexit dogma, avoid Burnham’s trap, reject Reform UK’s posturing, and put hard-headed British self-interest back at the heart of Conservative politics.
Albie Amankona is a Broadcaster, Financial Analyst and political activist.
The Conservative Party is currently trapped between two equally delusional political fantasies on Europe. On one side, the blinkered ideologues of Reform UK continue to peddle the absurd fiction that Brexit has been a pristine triumph with zero downsides. On the other side, Labour and the obsessive Rejoin lobby insist that throwing ourselves back into Brussels’ embrace will magically cure all of Britain’s structural woes. Both are selling snake oil, and it is high time Conservatives embraced a cold, hard dose of reality.
I am no longer a Brexiteer, nor am I a Remainer — I am a patriot.
I do not care about the theological factionalism of 2016; I simply care about restoring our nation to economic prosperity and growth, bringing migration down to low and strictly controlled levels, rebuilding cultural cohesion, upholding uncompromising law and order, and guaranteeing national security. From that cold, patriotic perspective, Brexit was ultimately a colossal waste of time. But precisely because I recognise that fundamental truth, I know that wasting the next decade trying to crawl back into the European Union would be an equally futile betrayal of our national interest.
Looking back at the apocalyptic forecasts of the Remain campaign and the starry-eyed promises of the Leave camp, only one objective conclusion can be drawn: EU membership was never the primary driver of British destiny that either side claimed. The post-Brexit economic boom and halt to migration promised by Leave zealots never materialised, but neither did the immediate economic and social Armageddon prophesied by Remainer doom-mongers.
The plain truth is that Britain’s long-term prosperity, productivity, immigration crisis, and institutional decay have precious little to do with whether we sit inside or outside the European Union. Very little has fundamentally changed. EU membership was vastly oversold, and so was Brexit.
Recognising this reality is vital if Conservatives are to avoid walking straight into Andy Burnham’s Brexit trap. Burnham knows that Kemi Badenoch recognises her route back to Number 10 cannot run solely through the Reform leaning Red Wall; it must also win back the Blue Wall, which fell largely to the Liberal Democrats and Labour.
Figures on the Left are eager to frame the Tories as anti-business zealots who view any deal reducing trade friction with Europe as a betrayal, calculating that this will alienate moderate, prosperity-focused voters in those southern heartlands. If the Conservative Party wants to retain its crown as the natural party of business and win back those voters, we must not fall into the trap of claiming that greater EU market access is an evil.
While I do not wish for us to rejoin the Single Market or Customs Union, it is a simple matter of fact that smoother market access is something British enterprise largely supports. Denying economic reality to appease dogmatists does not make us principled; it makes us look economically illiterate to the very wealth creators we rely on.
Such an approach will also help figures like James Cleverly, Festus Akinbusoye or Sara Gezdari kick Sadiq Khan and Labour out in London. Capitalising on the capital’s dynamism requires pragmatic solutions, not head-in-the-sand isolationism that hands urban seats to Labour and the Liberal Democrats on a silver platter.
In a volatile, multipolar world where American backing can no longer be taken for granted, isolationism is pure folly. We must work with the EU where it benefits Britain, and diverge ruthlessly where it does not. We cannot afford to waste the next decade waging an ideological holy war to rejoin an institution that will not fix our underlying problems, nor can we allow Reform UK to define conservative policy with their unserious posturing.
Yet, instead of capitalising on our independence, former Conservative Home Secretaries like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak handed the country a bitter irony: they abolished European freedom of movement only to replace it with a vastly inferior, higher-volume migration system.
The old system, for all its flaws, brought in young Europeans who came to work, study, and contribute for a few years before returning home, usually travelling alone and making a net contribution to our public purse. Under the watch of Conservative ministers, we swapped that for a massive influx from developing nations, bringing far higher numbers of permanent settlers accompanied by large groups of dependents, who on average contribute significantly less economically than culturally similar European workers. That was not taking back control; it was swapping a somewhat functional arrangement for Boriswave.
While Reform UK, filled with Boris and his eponymous wave’s midwives, contents itself with shouting simplistic slogans and pretending no economic trade-offs exist, serious Conservatives must deliver real solutions. We do not need to restore full freedom of movement to act in our national interest. We should pursue greater reciprocal mobility with Europe, in direct exchange for superior trading terms and deeper security ties.
A genuinely Conservative strategy must combine pragmatic European engagement with a muscular, unapologetic approach to border security and state resources. On illegal migration, we must end the legal merry-go-round by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and establishing a robust, deterrence-based third-country removal plan, akin to the Rwanda framework, to process and deport illegal arrivals.
To restore law and order at the border, we should institute mandatory deportations for foreign criminals, significantly increase the time required to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), and immediately strip state benefits access so that welfare and free NHS treatment is strictly reserved for British citizens.
Finally, we must completely restructure non-EU migration by imposing significantly tougher visa criteria across the board, whilst maintaining streamlined, high-skilled pathways exclusively for natural allies such as Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States.
It is time to bury Brexit dogma, avoid Burnham’s trap, reject Reform UK’s posturing, and put hard-headed British self-interest back at the heart of Conservative politics.