Quiet success of Brexit milestone
INDEPENDENCE Day looks set to pass atWestminster with barely a squeak next week. Wednesday marks five years since the UK’s historic referendum vote to quit the EU.Yet Parliament will hold no formal proceedings to mark the milestone.
On the day itself, MPs will discuss a less controversial anniversary with a Westminster Hall debate celebrating 100 years of the Tyne Bridge instead.
The House of Lords, dominated by peers who opposed the withdrawal from the EU, is also ignoring the issue with debates on folic acid and electric cars scheduled on the anniversary date.
Likewise in Downing Street, Boris Johnson has no plans to mark the 2016 vote.
The Prime Minister was the most high-profile politician leading the Leave campaign and eventually swept to power with his pledge to “Get Brexit Done”.
But aides insist the anniversary of the destiny-defining national choice will be just another working day at No10. At most, he may briefly acknowledge the anniversary in his opening remarks at Prime Minister’s Questions.
“The PM is focused on the future,” one Downing Street insider told me, adding: “He wants to get on with levelling up the country and modernising infrastructure.
“This week’s trade deal with Australia shows the benefits that Brexit has brought. There will be many more trade deals to follow.”
MR JOHNSON has long yearned to put the acrimony of the Leave-Remain divide behind him. Shortly after he finally concluded the tortuous process of taking the country out of the EU, he encouraged ministers and aides to drop the B-word.
Next week’s virtual silence on the issue at Westminster suggests those hopes have been achieved.
The Covid crisis understandably diverted MPs’ attention from the Brexit aftermath.
It also helped highlight the benefits of national independence by allowing a UK free of the bureaucracy of the European Medicines Agency to race ahead with mass vaccination.
And the ongoing “sausage war” over the separate post-Brexit rules covering some food products in Northern Ireland has served to once again expose the bullying and pettifogging instincts at the heart of Brussels.
Labour and other parties had the opportunity to pick topics for Opposition Day debates in the Commons next week. Their decision not to use the fifth anniversary of the referendum as momentum to hold an audit into the results of the vote speaks volumes. Doing so would only show once again how the warnings of the Remainers’ “Project Fear” propaganda blitz during the referendum campaign have proved unfounded.
The economic shock predicted by Brexit opponents in the event of a Leave vote never emerged. Amid the colossal impact of the Covid pandemic, the UK economy has still consistently outperformed City expectations and official forecasts.
PROJECT Fear claimed every household in the country would be on average £4,300 a year worse off as a result if the UK left the EU. That has proved to be nonsense.
Against that background, the once vociferous anti-Brexit mob at Westminster is keeping conspicuously quiet.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, a former Brexit spokesman and architect of the party’s baffling European policy in the last parliament, is desperate for his MPs to move on with the issue as they struggle to win back support in Leave-backing former heartlands.
Even the EU-fanatic Lib Dems have turned down the volume on their hankering to return the UK to the bloc as they fight to get back into the game.
Brexiteers should welcome Wednesday’s muted referendum anniversary at Westminster. Five years on, virtual silence on the issue among the political elite should be taken as a sign of Brexit’s success. Happy Independence Day!