It's not our fault, say Brexit supporters. They could have just done as we said.
Friday marks five years since former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson got "Brexit done," which he had been talking about ever since the British voted yes to leave the EU in a referendum in 2016.
Boris Johnson was one of the leaders of the campaign to leave the EU, and on January 31, 2020, the final, formal divorce came. Now the time had come for all the promises made by Boris Johnson and his like-minded people to be fulfilled.
Reduced numbers of migrants, more money for the health service, now that Britain no longer has to pay the EU. Lucrative trade deals with countries like the United States.
Now five years later, it's all a mess, but Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the so-called Brexiteers and an ally of Boris Johnson, has an explanation for that. The Brexit wing has been let down.
He has been a minister on several occasions, but in the general election in July 2024, he suffered the same fate as many of his Conservative party colleagues: he was voted out when the party suffered a historic defeat.
The Conservatives had been in government since 2010. The party had won the referendum on June 23, 2016, in which 51.9 percent of the votes said yes to leaving the EU. Since then, the formal withdrawal came, but the Brexit promises have never been fulfilled.
Great Britain should break away from the green agenda
According to Rees-Mogg, this is because Great Britain has not broken away from all EU rules and the green agenda, as he recommended. He writes this in a column in the Daily Express newspaper ahead of the five-year anniversary. He advises the British to look at the new US president, Donald Trump.
"In his first hours, he left the Paris Agreement, which makes energy more expensive and people colder and poorer," Rees-Mogg writes about the Paris climate agreement.
"The UK has had five years to do it since we left the EU, but we haven't even scratched the surface."
He further writes that too many EU regulations are still costing British growth. As a minister, he had a plan to get rid of the regulations, but according to Rees-Mogg, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got cold feet.
The green agenda must be scrapped, he further writes. Expensive energy is harming British industry. The steel industry is closing, the car industry is being undermined. Instead, the British should extract gas from their underground and then go out there and reap the benefits of Brexit.
Rees-Mogg does not have the people with him. Opinion polls have long shown that a majority regret leaving the EU.
Six polls in December and January, when combined, suggest that 56 percent would vote yes to the EU and 44 percent would vote no if there were a referendum now. But there is none. Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister, is talking about a new relationship with the EU, not a referendum.
A YouGov poll on Wednesday said just 30 percent think leaving the EU was the right thing to do. 75 percent of young adults who were unable to vote in 2016 are among the dissatisfied.
Trade has fallen sharply
One Brexit argument was that Britain would do better if it had more control over its own destiny. It was the EU's fault that so many legal and illegal migrants were coming. British taxpayers sent billions of pounds to the EU without getting anything in return.
Boris Johnson had a bus with "350 million pounds" written on the side. That was, he said, the amount that the British sent to the EU every week. That money could instead go to the NHS, the health service. The amount was a gross amount. The EU's money for the UK had not been deducted.
In any case, the NHS still lacks money, and this became clear to everyone during the Covid-19 epidemic. At the same time, the British are plagued by expensive energy and inflation, which leads to expensive rents, among other things.
This is also the case in many other countries, but the British have received less money after Brexit. Trade with the outside world has fallen by 12 billion pounds - 107 billion kroner. The fall in foreign investment is 17 billion pounds, 151 billion kroner. kr.
The Brexit wing's promises to stop immigration have not been kept either. More and more immigrants, both legal and illegal, are coming.
/ritzau/
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