Rejoice! You live in a free country for the first time in 50 years

FINALLY, the great day of our departure from the European Union is almost upon us. At 11pm GMT on Friday, January 31, Britain becomes a fully independent nation for the first time in almost half a century.

When Parliament decided to join the then Common Market in October 1972, and when a referendum confirmed that decision in June 1975, many of those involved were not fully aware of what a momentous step they were taking.

The Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, then almost alone among mainstream politicians, had warned correctly in 1962 that our membership would be ‘the end of Britain as an independent nation state… the end of a thousand years of history’, adding: ‘You may say, “All right, let it end!” But, my goodness, it’s a decision that needs a little care and thought.’

The care and thought, sadly, came too late, and it was only the actual experience of the European Union’s ever-expanding interference in our national life – accelerating after the 1980s – that brought home the truth of Gaitskell’s prophecy.

Increasingly, almost every aspect of our national life from our weights and measures, our fisheries and farming, to the way our laws were made and the passports we carry, were shaped by powers that lay outside our control. At one point we came close to abandoning the pound sterling. And we did lose control of our borders.

Now we have the most amazing second chance.

Unlike so many other great nations that have meekly submitted to such takeovers, we have reasserted our former freedom in a referendum and then in December’s decisive Election, which confirmed that vote. Parliament has at last done its duty and reversed the error of October 1972.

Within days we shall once again be free to set and enforce our own terms of trade, to control our own territorial seas, decide who may and who may not cross our frontiers, make and enforce our own laws free from interference by supranational courts, to extradite or not on our own decision. If we wish to be free to trade once again at home in our own customary measurements, we can do so. We can have British passports, not EU travel documents.

Some of these things may be symbolic and emotional, and none the worse for that. Such matters count in the characters of nations.

Some will be tough to negotiate and enact. But all are thrilling recoveries of lost liberty, an opportunity unmatched in modern times for a national revival of spirit and enterprise.

So we all ought to live up to this. And our Government needs to live up to it as well. Perhaps exhausted by the sheer effort of getting Brexit done, Boris Johnson has seemed in the past few weeks to be treading water. Now he must recover the energy that won him the Election, and seize the best chance for success and prosperity this country has had in many decades.

HOW can we possibly trust the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei with our 5G network?

China, as we see in its handling of the current coronavirus crisis, remains a secretive and authoritarian country. What surveillance or intelligence virus might it spread through Huawei’s technology? It is shocking that this country cannot build its own 5G network, but Huawei’s comparative cheapness is simply not a good enough reason to allow China so deep into our economy and society.