Now we are no longer bound by EU rules we should be looking to the rest of the world'

After a tireless crusade, Britain finally freed itself from the shackles of the European Union on January 31, 2020. Each day as we approach the fifth anniversary, Express writers will take an in-depth look at what has changed, the opportunities that lie ahead and the threats to Brexit

- Ross Clark

VOTE-COUNTING in the 2016 referendum had not even concluded before Remain campaigners were trying to tell us that Britain had condemned itself to a future as an isolated, xenophobic hellhole steeped in economic decline while the EU sailed on confidently without us.

The then Tory MP Anna Soubry reacted to news of a sinking pound by saying: "Yesterday we were told this was all scaremongering. Here we are, can you believe it, this morning talking about an economy which is in this terrible shock. We have made a very, very bad mistake." Remoaners have since lost no opportunity to claim that Britain's problems are all to do with Brexit.

A few empty supermarket shelves in 2021 were attributed to our departure from the EU- oblivious to the fact that we were in the midst of a global pandemic and that supply chains were deeply disrupted.

Think tanks make extravagant claims about how richer we would be had we never left the EU-based on preposterous modelling which assumes the economy would have continued growing strongly through Covid and the energy crisis which followed the Ukraine war.

Those who try to sell us these narratives must count on us not looking too carefully at what has been happening across the Channel.

They must hope we haven't noticed that Germany is entering its third year of recession, or France is as up to its eyeballs in debt as Britain is and worse, the National Rally and the Socialists have squashed any hope that President Macron might rein in public spending by, for example, increasing France's absurdly low retirement age.