Brexit was to end red tape. It only created more bureaucracy

Yet the ten-year anniversary of the vote that brought it about slipped by with little comment or publicity. Those who thought the policy was a mistake needed to say little, with figures from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) showing what a multi-billion pound negative it has been for economic output – down six to eight per cent. This would have eased the budget problems the government is facing – although in reality even without the Brexit hit successive governments would still have found ways to overspend and over-borrow. As for those who advocated Brexit with promises of new trade deals, stronger border protection and billions extra for the NHS they remained silent as the anniversary passed. That is understandable, given that key leaders of the campaign have problems beyond the accuracy of what they promised voters. Boris Johnson departed the political stage, having caused his party potentially terminal damage; Owen Paterson, who courted the agriculture vote, resigned from politics over allegations around financial rule breaking. Nigel Farage, now Reform but previously the Brexit party, is more concerned about allegations of improper donor funding. All in all this is a sad summary of a policy destroyed before it even took off by political incompetence and the headwinds of external events from Covid to global conflict. These headwinds doomed any chance Brexit ever had and made isolationism an uncomfortable place to be for the UK. We will never fully know whether Brexit might have worked if the many challenges it met had not come together in a perfect storm. So far as agriculture is concerned none of the many promises of those advocating Brexit were delivered. It was supposed to reduce the red tape associated with the CAP, but we have ended up with policies more bureaucratic than anything Brussels came up with over many decades of the CAP. Making this worse is the fact that in response to farmer protests the EU embarked on a policy of simplification of the CAP to make it more farmer friendly. That process never happened here, so we have ended up with the worst of all worlds. We were promised a retreat from the green policies of the EU. That has certainly not happened and the UK is embracing the same net zero policies as the EU, but with greater zeal. In Northern Ireland, while food and farming might still be the biggest part of the economy DAERA and the Executive are pursuing green thinking above all else. Its approach is worse than that of the EU, which has eased back because the Greens have lost much of the political power they once enjoyed. At the same time there has been a greater focus on the importance of European food security in an uncertain world. This means that two key planks of the arguments in favour of Brexit put to farmers delivery have been non-existent. That is, by any standards, political failure and it was a failure led from day one by Boris Johnson; his legacy will always be a non-functioning Brexit and a border down the Irish Sea because dogma stopped him remaining in a sensible customs union with the EU, like Switzerland and Norway. The equally big failed promises were around new trade deals and export opportunities. In reality we have no trade deals of any significance we would not have had as an EU member state and part of the world’s biggest trading bloc. The deals that have emerged have been not only poor in terms of food exports but significantly worse than those of the EU when it comes to protecting farming from imports that would not meet standards here. That is an area where once again the blandishments to farmers to back Brexit were more about illusion than reality. These claims are now widely accepted. Those who backed Brexit have been denied any opportunity to see how it might have worked; those who opposed it feel vindicated, in no small measure because of the headwinds that doomed the policy to failure. However we are not going to re-join the EU any time soon and better relations with Brussels will not be about joining a customs union. Brexit remains the only show in town and we need it to succeed via better political and economic relations with the the EU.