Britain Needs To Rise Up To Post-Brexit Reality

What survives of the Brexit debate is a wearily predictable: ‘we told you so’. Remainers rightly point to all the additional red tape from border checks and the rules of origin problems creating tariffs within supply chains

- Vince Cable

After four years of the Brexit saga, the last few weeks have been a period of respite. The consequences of leaving the “transition period” at the end of January have not just been overshadowed by the pandemic, but also by the royal family’s real time enactment of the next series of The Crown.

For better or worse, Brexit has happened and without the upheaval of a total “no deal” outcome. Some of the leading characters in the drama have moved on. Nigel Farage is launching a war against “wokeness” and is hunting for Red Guards as part of his campaign against Chinese infiltration. The Conservative Remainers who stood and fought were wiped out politically, as were all defectors from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Some of us retired to do other things.

What survives of the Brexit debate is a wearily predictable: “we told you so”. Remainers rightly point to all the additional red tape from border checks and the rules of origin problems creating tariffs within supply chains. The collapse – by 40 per cent – in exports to the EU may well have been amplified by Covid checks. But it also represents a long-term decline in our trade with our biggest trade partner with entirely predictable, and predicted, economic costs. We did tell them so.

But Leavers are entirely fair to point to the shambolic EU vaccination programme and the petulant European response to the fact that, for once, Britain did something well, helped by a nimble national medicines regulator. It would have been technically and legally possible for us to run our own vaccine programme as an EU member state, but the likelihood is we would have been persuaded to participate in what has been a slower and less effective regime.