One of my golden rules of politics is to listen carefully to Alastair Campbell – and then do the opposite.
The Labour spin doctor, who’s pumped out more dodgy dossiers than McDonald’s has burgers, is reliably wrong about everything. And the issue on which he’s been loudest for longest is the issue on which he’s been mistaken the most – Brexit.
After the Brexit campaign, he tweeted with all the authority of someone who once said we were only 45 minutes from Armageddon: ‘If we leave, Nissan leave.’
Well, not only did Nissan not leave, the car giant doubled down, last year announcing a £2 billion investment in its Sunderland car plant.
And thanks to this Government’s policies, our world-leading automotive sector secured more than £23 billion of private and public investment commitments in 2023 – dwarfing the past seven years combined.
Secretary of State for Business and Trade, MP Kemi Badenoch has made the case for voters to vote Conservative
Ms Badenoch writes: ‘One of my golden rules of politics is to listen carefully to Alastair Campbell – and then do the opposite’
So don’t let Remoaners like Campbell fool you. This was not, as the BBC would say, ‘despite Brexit’ but because of Brexit, as we become smarter about powering our economy.
The Remoaners said our GDP would shrink by 4 per cent if we left. But the British economy is bigger now than when we voted to leave, having grown more than France, Germany and Italy since 2010.
They said we wouldn’t be able to export. We are now the world’s fourth largest exporter, up from seventh in 2021.
They said no one would sign new trade deals with us and we’d lose the trade deals we had from EU membership. We confounded them, reaching agreements with 73 countries from Mexico to Malaysia.
And former prime minister Boris Johnson secured a deal with the EU that gives all of our goods tariff-free access to the EU market – something we were told was impossible.
Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, speaks with his Brexit secretary Keir Starmer in 2019
In the biggest mandate in British history, 17.4 million people voted to Leave the EU. Pictured: Pro-Brexit supporters
Boris Johnson posing in front of a Let’s take back control truck at the Vote Leave campaign in 2016
Even more important, Brexit freed our economy so I could sign the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which connects us to the fastest growing economies in the world and gives us unprecedented global leverage.
These are the hard facts, Mr Campbell. The rest, as they say, is just politics.
Just as our economy has grown post-Brexit, so we’ve been able to invest in public services. We haven’t just given £350 million extra a week to the NHS – it’s more than twice that now, at £710 million, and that is inflation-adjusted. (What the NHS is doing with that money is a different matter.)
We’ve only just started to see the benefits of leaving the EU. There is so much more to come, but a Labour supermajority in the Commons risks losing it all.
Every utterance from Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves or any of the Shadow Cabinet, every hint of a giveaway on fishing, migration or regulation, betrays a total lack of belief in the British people to thrive in a self-governing democracy.
Since we left the EU, Brussels has borrowed two thirds of a trillion pounds to finance post-Covid recovery. Britain could have been lumped with a huge share of that bill.
Sir Keir Starmer during an election campaign visit with Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar on Thursday
Boris Johnson in front of his Get Brexit Done bus at the 2019 general election
We have also seen calls grow for the EU to create its own army. And Brussels has taken steps to require all members to tax businesses in the same way. So, a federal army, common debt, a shared approach to tax – all the things we were told were myths put about by the Leave campaign.
If we are to defend our hard-won freedoms against this, we need the strongest possible Conservative Party with the greatest number of MPs.
I know many good people who believe in Brexit are tempted to vote for Reform. I understand their feelings but a vote for Reform will split the vote against Labour, enabling a strengthened Starmer to unpick Brexit.
Eight years ago, like myself, many readers of the Mail cast a vote for an independent Britain. And many who didn’t respected the referendum result nonetheless and wanted the Government to deliver a resilient post-Brexit economy.
The only way to stop us going back to square one with Labour is to vote Conservative on July 4.