𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Brexiteer Lord John Redwood has demanded Labour undo the “regulatory shackles” binding the UK to Europe. The Conservative former Cabinet Minister said the Government “wrongly” believes that aligning more closely with Brussels will boost the UK’s economy. When asked for his thoughts on ministers’ push for closer ties to the EU, Lord Redwood said: “They’re quite wrong. The government rightly says it needs a growth strategy. It wrongly thinks that aligning more closely with Europe will give us growth. We know it doesn’t.

“We were very slow growing in the EU in our last decade or so, because the EU was very slow growing. We normally grew slightly faster than they did but they were holding us back, and we’ve fallen further and further behind the United States of America. I think it’s shaming for Europe that GDP per head in America is now exactly double GDP per head in the EU.”

Lord Redwood added: “Our GDP per head is only 20% above the EU, and we should get much nearer to America in terms of GDP per head. We could do that if we took off some of the regulatory shackles and if we generated more really good free trade agreements that cover services, which is our great strength.”

The peer has become the latest high-profile politician to back the Express’s Give Us a Proper Brexit campaign.

He took aim at Chancellor Rachel Reeves for saying that cosying up to the EU when it comes to trade was the “biggest prize”.

She made the comments at an event with a Brussels think tank last week.

Lord Redwood said: “She’s completely wrong. I mean, and this is a clever woman who’s got a perfectly good economics degree, but she doesn’t seem to have understood it all because she wants to shackle us to one of the slowest growing areas of the world that spends most of its time thinking up new regulatory tortures and fines for the successful American companies that actually keep our business turning.”

The former cabinet minister said he was happy for the UK to strike bilateral deals and agreements with “friendly countries” when it comes to defence.

But he added: “They’ve got to be mutually beneficial.”

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The Tory ex-MP said: “I don’t think we ought to take on a lot of commitment for the defence of the continent other than the ones we’ve already accepted through NATO. I think what we need to do, is to spend more at home on home defence and one of the themes I always put to governments is you will not defend these islands if you import all the weapons, you have to be able to make your own weapons and that means you need to make you own steel and to make own armaments and to, to make your own explosives and that requires heavy industry and petrochemicals and so forth.

“One of the biggest dangers of the whole EU project is linking us to, and committing us to, an energy policy which simply doesn’t work, which ends up with extremely expensive energy and with industrial imports of so many things from China and America who are not shackled with their energy.”

Sir Keir Starmer has drawn up plans under which the UK will ramp up its net zero targets and cede control over its energy policy as part of closer alignment with Brussels.

A memorandum, published by the Cabinet Office earlier this month, spells out the price that the UK is willing to pay to reset relations with Europe.