Brexit’s going to be a passport to more prosperity
HERE IS a thought to set the pulse racing: this time next year we will be just weeks away from leaving the EU. When we instigated Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty we set in train a timetable that will lead to us leaving the EU in March 2019.
For the likes of the man we will have to get used to calling Sir Nick Clegg, that is a national disaster. Sir Nick and his fellow Remoaners have never reconciled themselves to being told by those who voted Leave that we’d had enough of their project to have Britain ruled from Brussels.
You can see from their sneering attitude to the return of the British passport that they have contempt for anyone who does not think we should leave power in their hands – that we hoi polloi should know our place.
But for the majority of us, of course, March 2019 is a date to anticipate with excitement and – yes – not a little joy. That’s in part because we appreciate the democratic and economic benefits of self-government.
Project Fear said that Brexit would be a disaster. We have already seen the nonsense of that with booming employment. And The City, we were told, would collapse with a “Brexodus” to cities such as Frankfurt and Paris.
In reality, The City now has more jobs than before and is recognised as being even more dominant as the global financial centre.
BIT by bit, little by little, even some of those who were most active in the attempt to stop us leaving are adjusting their attitudes in the face of this reality.
For example, yesterday the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) – one of those organisations that had forecast economic doom and gloom in a Brexit-induced spiral of collapse in consumer spending and investment – changed its tune. “In practice this has not happened,” they admitted.
They had said that we would be left behind by France. Now they say that we will pull ahead of France by 2020.
As for a trade deal, which we have continually been told by