𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Looking back at the EU referendum ten years on, it is striking just how many people were critical to Leave’s victory. Boris Johnson, the popular mayor of London, made a compelling case to middle-of-the-road voters.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage tirelessly campaigned over many decades to secure the referendum. My co-founder of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, was the pugnacious campaign director we needed. I could go on.

In the roster of Brexit heroes, there is also a particularly special place for the Daily Express and its readers. I first met the late Patrick O’Flynn, the superb political editor of this newspaper, when I was running the TaxPayers’ Alliance. We were working on a project to shine a light on EU wasteful spending when Gordon Brown was prime minister, and we spotted a significant uptick in dissatisfaction with Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Bolstered by these insights, the Express became the first national newspaper to come out for Leave in 2010 and, in 2011, started a parliamentary petition to press David Cameron to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.

Just a few years later, in 2013, David Cameron committed himself to an EU vote in his Bloomberg speech. A domino effect that wouldn’t have been possible without the ongoing campaigning of the Daily Express and its readers.

This is a story I relay in my new book, Ten Years On. So, might I begin by saying a sincere thank you – Brexit wouldn’t have been possible without you.

But where are we now, a decade after the vote? Was it all worth it? What has really changed? Reading some of the Brexit coverage in recent weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Project Fear was right: that Brexit had indeed ruined Britain.

All those predictions were, and are, wrong.

Take the claim by people who wish to rejoin the EU that Brexit has had a negative economic impact on the UK. The doomsters would have you believe that Project Fear’s predictions came to pass, that we’re paying a huge cost for being outside the EU and that the moonshot for Britain’s economy is to head straight back in.

This is wrong. The economic models used to make this case assume that the UK would have broadly grown like the US or Estonia if we hadn’t left the EU. I would dearly love to have the low taxes and cheap energy of these countries – and we would certainly grow much faster as an economy were we to take their lead – but they are not reliable indicators of how we would have done.

If you compare Britain’s economic performance to France and Germany – much more reasonable comparators – we have grown faster than both since 2016 and are in the middle for per capita growth.

How does Brexit live up to the vision outlined by Vote Leave during the referendum campaign?

In my house, I have a piece of plasterboard hung up on the wall outside my study, with Vote Leave’s slogans scrawled in Dominic Cummings’s distinctive handwriting: “Our money, our priorities,” “Europe yes, EU no”, “Safer Choice” and “Take Control”. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

First, “Our money, our priorities”. This was the thinking behind the famous message on the side of the red bus that we spent £350million a week on the EU and that this could be better spent on the NHS, or on other priorities.

Whatever you think about Vote Leave’s use of the figure, from 2019 onwards, we were spending as a country £350million a week more on the NHS. That’s a promise delivered. And were we to rejoin the EU now, the membership fee would be more like £28billion a year – more than £500million per week.

Next, “Europe yes, EU no”. Our foreign policy since 2016 has lived up to this vision. We’ve taken the lead in assisting the people of Ukraine in their fightback against Putin’s Russia, and we have beautifully hosted both the G7 and COP summits.

And just last week, we saw Zelensky coming to London for a meeting with Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron of France and Friedrich Merz of Germany. This shows how we have balanced pursuing our own path in the world, whilst still being a good partner to our European neighbours.

Third, we have taken back control. Laws and regulations are now decided by ministers and MPs in Westminster, rather than being dictated to us by Brussels. This power has been used in ways I support, such as the trade deals we’ve agreed with key Asian allies, the US and India; and in ways I disagree with, such as Labour’s VAT on private school fees, which contravenes EU rules.

But decisions are now made by our own elected representatives, which is a good thing for both the country and democratic accountability.

The elephant in the room on this is immigration, where control is perceived to have broken down.

Post-Covid, with widely predicted skills shortages, Boris Johnson’s government took the decision that much higher levels of immigration were required to fill the skills gaps. On top of these, Ukrainian and Hong Kong refugees were added, and the migration figures then hit record highs.

Voters then comprehensively held the Conservative government to account for that decision, with its historic election defeat in 2024. This, for me, is accountability in action.

Finally, we talked about how being outside the EU was the “Safer Choice”. Look at the path the EU has been on since 2016. They’ve passed 13,924 new legal acts since 2019. The IMF has said that the EU’s debt trajectory “would reach 130% of GDP by 2040.”

The EU will make up just 10% of the global economy by then. The EU has gone further on its dangerous path towards regulation, debt and economic decline. Given this direction of travel, we should be grateful we’ve left the EU train – it was the safer option.

Yes, there is clearly more to do, but the pluses of Brexit are substantial. Now is the time to use this freedom to pursue the policies which make us more prosperous as a country. Whether it’s reining in the blind pursuit of net zero, which is so damaging our economy, or untangling the Habitats Directive, so we can build more homes. This needs to be the next phase of Brexit.

So don’t be tempted by those who say we should rejoin. Even Gina Miller – who did so much to try and stop Brexit – said last week that we shouldn’t rejoin, and Jean-Claude Juncker said we’d have to lose the pound, join the Schengen migration area and pay a higher membership fee.

Rather than spending £28billion on the EU – which would require a 4p rise in income tax – let’s embrace the opportunities Brexit has provided to go for the policies that create prosperity.

It’s time to move on from the Brexit battles, embrace our new freedoms and use them to make the UK rich again.

Matthew Elliott was the chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, and is the author of Ten Years On: The Untold Story of Brexit, published on June 23 by Biteback