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What Brexit has proved, I'm afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were. We have mismanaged this totally and if you look at simple things, simple things such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.
Arguably, now we are back in control, we are regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.

It is because Britain was breaking that Brexit happened in the first place. It was a necessary, phantom new road to prosperity when all other roads had reached a dead end. In that sense, it has been a success. Because when it did happen, the shock was so huge that it diverted attention away from all the reasons that it had come about in the first place. To those who opposed Brexit, leaving the EU was not only a political event, it was an emotional and cultural one too: a physical wrenching from a liberal fraternity, perpetrated by liars and charlatans and maybe even shady foreign influence. The feelings Brexit inspires are understandably strong. But they are also broadly wasted when their purpose is merely to reverse Brexit, to fixate on Brexit as a uniquely calamitous event that is bringing about Britain’s decline, rather than a secondary cause of that decline.

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Those prognosticators of doom who said that Brexit would be an economic catastrophe for the UK – not only were they wrong, they demonstrated a profound ignorance of the British people when they attributed their legitimate desire to regain our national sovereignty as some mix of stupidity and xenophobia.

I have followed the inspiration of Churchill, Macmillan, Heath and Thatcher, who gave Britain a leading position in one of the power blocks of the 21st century. I have seen that overturned on a cynical exploitative combination of promises led by Boris Johnson. He won a large majority on the slogan Get Brexit Done. Yet here we are, years later, when the criticism, even from its most fanatical supporters like Nigel Farage, is that Brexit has failed.

Britain is equally terrified of free trade, lest it plunges us into a libertarian dystopia awash with cancerous meat and alcoholism. ... The new Brexit alcohol duty regime that links rates to specific alcohol strength outdoes Brussels in its convoluted paternalism.

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Brexit has been pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions. Brexit has shown us one thing - and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this - it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars. This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it.

[<nowiki/>Brexit] is stupidity for a country with 53 percent of its exports going to the Continent and to the rest of Europe. It’s even so stupid that Britain’s best friends, the U.S., don’t understand it all.

Some in the Labour Party want to blame our defeat only on the leadership. Others want to blame it only on Brexit. Yet it was about both of those things and more. In our towns in Yorkshire, we knocked on thousands of doors trying to persuade people to stick with Labour. Some said they just didn’t want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister. Others were fearful that we wouldn’t stand up for national security. Some wanted Brexit done and felt angry and let down. We found little enthusiasm for Boris Johnson. One woman told me in tears that she was voting Tory for the first time and she was furious with us for making her feel like she had to do it.

At a Notting Hill party the Saturday after the referendum, I had a stand-up barney with a Labour MP. "It’s a disaster!" he cried. "We need a second vote right away." Other guests nodded gravely, but I couldn’t contain myself. Hang on, I said, are you saying a democratic decision is invalid because you lost? "It’s appalling," he wailed. "It can’t happen!" Thus began my life for the next five years.
I voted Remain – "with no illusions" as we used to say when I was a student Trot – but I was raised in Doncaster North, a Red Wall seat. I saw the gradual untethering of traditional Labour supporters in my own late father. In 2009, after the local party was discredited by the Donnygate expenses scandal, he voted to make a so-called English Democrat mayor. My father, and millions like him, had little in common with bien pensant London lefties whom I call friends. A reckoning was coming.
What surprised me wasn’t the result, but the reckless determination of Remainers to reverse it. Did they think 17 million people would just accept their votes being cancelled? If Remain had won, would they have been cool with Nigel Farage demanding a rerun? The contempt for Brexit voters – that they were thick, old racists, from shitty places – disgusted me.

Brexit was a chilling example of how truly intolerant and despicable the left in this country are. I know people whose own parents almost disowned them because they voted leave. I have probably received in the region of 300 death threats – mainly from Muslims who want to prove Islam is a “religion of peace” by killing me, as well as Black Lives Matter supporters. I now really enjoy the death threats because I post them all on social media and they allow me to illustrate how we are stupidly shaping society to cater for the most aggressive, hateful, bigots imaginable. The left denounces people like me as bigots for standing up for true liberal principles which made Western civilisation great in the first place.

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