It was great news 10 years ago that a majority of voters in our biggest ever election/referendum wanted the UK to be self governing again. We should put people elected by the voters in charge of our government, and should be able to get rid of them if they fail or displease. So many things were wrong or unhelpful from the EU, but UK voters could not vote out of office the people who made the decisions.
We have already enjoyed some big wins from leaving.
We are now saving around £17 bn a year as we no longer have to surrender some tax revenues to them and no longer have to pay a large membership fee.
We have reached agreement with India and the TPP for new trade deals, and improved some of the trade deals we had via the EU when we rolled them over.
We have been able to improve animal welfare standards by for example ending the export of live animals.
We have been able to cancel tariffs on 24% of our imports where we buy things we cannot make or grow for ourselves, making products cheaper.
We switched from Erasmus to Turing to give more help to UK students going abroad, with more choice of university outside the EU as well as just within the EU under Erasmus. It also cut the bills for UK taxpayers as we did not have to pay for EU students to come here.
We regained our seat on the World Trade Organisation, giving us more influence to shape world trade policy
We have avoided a large number of new rules and regulations the EU has passed since we left, giving an advantage to our AI and services industries.
We have made regulatory changes to help our pharmaceutical and plant development research based industries
Migration into the UK for lower paid jobs has been reduced from the EU with the ending of freedom of movement
We have avoided any liability for the massive Euro 800 bn borrowing programme the EU is embarked upon. We could not afford more debt.
This current government has been able to offer huge subsidies to the steel industry, and to put VAT on school fees which the EU would have prevented. These would not be my choices but they show our elected government using Brexit freedoms.
There are so many more wins to be had
We can get rid of carbon taxes and emissions trading, EU originated policies which make our energy too dear.
We can negotiate trade deals with more places around the world with faster growing economies.
We can avoid putting the coming EU carbon tariffs or border taxes on our imports which will make things dearer.
We can cut migration from non EU further and get proper control of our borders now we are out of free movement. The last government was wrong not to do so.
We can cut and remove VAT from products, as we have with green items.
We can favour UK suppliers in public procurement
We can reduce the inherited regulatory EU burden on businesses
June 23, 2026
We can avoid governments sneaking back into the EU under the guise of a ‘reset’?
June 23, 2026
“We should put people elected by the voters in charge of our government”
I disagree. Brexit showed how this is exactly what we don’t want, because it turned out we can’t trust them to do what we tell them. They can manage the government, but must not be in a positipn to forget who is in charge: that’s the people’s role. Otherwise we have a dictatorship of the elected representatives., who are unanswerable to anyone between elections.
We need Swiss-style referendum powers to control the government.
June 23, 2026
the people who make most of the decisions are the senior layers of the UK public sector, and we still cannot vote them out.