YES, of course Brexit was the right decision. And that’s exactly what I said on BBC Politics Live last week when a lot of jaws in the studio hit the floor.
After the ninth anniversary of the British people’s decision to leave the European Union, I took direct aim at the anti-Brexit ruling class in this country by listing just a few of the advantages we now enjoy being outside the EU.
Like the fact we no longer have to pay billions every year into the EU budget, billions more covering the EU covid loans, and billions more supporting another round of ‘EU enlargement’ that will see another wave of poor countries including Albania, Bosnia and Serbia take more out of the EU economy than they will put in.
Like the fact we now have an independent trade policy that has made it possible for us to sign more than 70 trade deals with other nations around the world, including America and India. And like the fact we are no longer shackled to an inefficient, sluggish and divided EU bloc that represents a declining share of global GDP, down from more than 20 per cent in the mid-1990s to only 13 per cent today.
But you know what? Brexit, for me at least, was never just about the economics and it was never just about the final destination. I always saw Brexit as an off-ramp we could take to move in a completely different direction and firmly away from the dreary consensus that unites the Blairites and Brussels.
The English conservative thinker Sir Roger Scruton said he had supported Brexit and opposed the EU ‘because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter’. I suspect what Scruton had in mind when he said this, much like millions of other people who voted for Brexit, were the less tangible things that lie outside the realm of a traditional cost-benefit economic analysis in the Treasury.
Such as strengthening our national representative democracy, parliamentary sovereignty, judicial independence, tradition of common law, immigration policy, the integrity of our national borders, and the ability of the British state to fulfil its most basic task —to prioritise its own people and keep them safe.
Indeed, this is why I’ve always thought one of the most revealing polling questions about Brexit was one that found most Brexit voters said they were willing to take a short-term economic hit if it meant they got a longer-term repositioning of Britain.
Now, have our domestic politicians ever since that vote for Brexit failed to use this opportunity to return us to being the fully sovereign, self-governing, and independent nation that we could be? Absolutely. I’ve written about this extensively.
Did Boris Johnson and the Tories betray the promise of Brexit by lying to the British people and presiding over the very kind of mass immigration and border chaos most Leavers (and many Remainers) specifically say they did not want? Absolutely.
Does the promise of Brexit still exist? Could we still, if we had the right leaders and government who knew what it was about, use the levers that Brexit has made possible to change our country fundamentally for the better and bring about what I call a ‘factory reset’ in this country —putting our own people first, fixing the borders, ending mass migration, overturning the Blairite legacy, and building a completely different judicial, legal and political architecture in this country?
Again, absolutely. I genuinely believe that. Which is why I said what I said on BBC Politics Live, even if it did cause some of those present to lose their minds.
And in case some of you remain unconvinced about the benefits of Brexit, or others need some detailed arguments about why leaving the EU was the right move, my friend Gully Foyle, whom many of you will know from Twitter/X, has set out ten of the very big benefits that we now enjoy from his forthcoming book 75 Brexit Benefits. Enjoy!
1. We no longer pay billions a year in core budget contributions to access ‘free’ trade with our EU neighbours
The core EU budget contributions are calculated based predominantly on a member state’s Gross National Income or GNI. The UK was one of the biggest and richest EU member states, and so it was what is known as a ‘net contributor’ – which basically means we put in more into the budget than we took out. The UK covered roughly 12 per cent of the core EU budget contributions each year, so we would currently be paying in the region of 14-16billion euros per year after rebate and EU spending in the UK for the privilege of having a large trade deficit with the other member states. Since the UK left, the EU has increased the ceiling for how much of a GNI it could take as budget contributions from 1.2 per cent to 1.4 per cent.
2. UK tax and UK revenue stays in the UK instead of going to Brussels
While we were an EU member, the Commission considered several revenue streams to be their ‘own resources’ and so took the lion’s share of those as well. For example, 80 per cent of all customs duties collected at the UK border were also given to the EU, literally billions every year. This now goes into UK services instead of whatever the EU wanted to spend it on.
3. The UK avoids having to pay billions a year in paying off EU covid loans
Going back to the core EU budget for a moment – since we left, two things happened with the budget that did not get anywhere near enough press attention. Firstly, the EU gave itself the ability to take on debt on behalf of its members, and borrowed 750billion euros as a Covid Recovery Fund. This was publicised. But what didn’t get any attention was how the EU used the net contributing member states as guarantors for the loan, making them ultimately responsible for paying back the money if poorer member states reneged on payments. The EU facilitated this by increasing the cap on maximum core budget contributions from 1.4 per cent of annual GNI in the current budgetary period to a massive 2 per cent – almost doubling since 2020 their legal right to member state taxpayer money (with the previously mentioned increase from 1.2 per cent to 1.4 per cent). This is a cost the UK has avoided.
4. The UK avoids higher contributions and lower benefits through EU enlargement
Secondly on the topic of core EU budget contributions, is a leaked EU document regarding the projected cost of the nine countries currently trying to complete their accession process to join the EU in the coming years. These countries would all be net recipients, receiving more money than they contribute. EU number-crunchers believe that to let these additional countries join, the EU annual budget would increase by over 20 per cent a year, and net contributors would see a decrease in the amount of spending they saw from their contributions. The UK completely avoids this too.
5. As far as contributions vs costs are concerned, the UK is demonstrably better off
In 2024, the London School of Economics (LSE) published a paper on the impact of Brexit on the export of goods. This detailed paper concluded that the counterfactual forecasts were way off the mark with their ‘Project Fear’ calculations of 4-5 per cent less growth in GDP, and placed the cost on goods exports in the region of £27billion a year – and that services exports, though not covered in detail in the report, had not seen an impact (the growth in services exports has in fact increased since Brexit).
Let’s take the LSE report as fact for a moment, and accept a hit to goods exports of £27billion a year. The EU increased its cap on contributions to allow 2 per cent of GNI, which in 2024 would have been in excess of £50billion. That’s before you add the multiple billions of ‘own resources’ contributions and the need to cover increased EU membership costs and decreased returns.
You don’t need an economics degree to know 50 is larger than 27.
6. Cheaper goods from around the world
As a member of the EU Single Market and Customs Union, roughly 27 per cent of all types of goods were imported into the UK at a zero tariff level. From outside the EU, the new UK Global Tariff (UKGT) has nearly doubled that level to 47 per cent, removing tariffs from more than 2,000 goods that either the UK doesn’t produce, or nuisance tariffs that cost more to collect than they raise.
7. Refusing entry to the UK for EU criminals
Being outside the EU has allowed the UK border force to secure entry through official methods and equalise rights of entry so EU citizens are treated in the same way as everyone else. Before we left, the UK could not prevent entry of EU citizens due to a criminal record unless the Justice Secretary directly intervened.
8. Preventing the use of the most prolific fake EU IDs
In addition to this, the ability to use easily faked EU ID cards to gain entry to the UK has been removed, further securing the border. More than 24,000 EU citizens were refused entry to the UK in 2023-2024.
9. The UK avoids a £1billion a year tax grab disguised as a climate policy
The EU introduced a plastic levy in 2021 that charges all members an annual fee based on how much plastic they made but may not have recycled, which would have cost the UK over a billion a year had we stayed in the EU. These funds do not go towards any efforts to reduce plastic production, which would almost be understandable –instead they go into the EU budget as another funnel of cash.
10. Brexit improved the salaries of some of the lowest paid sectors
The removal of an eager and cheaper workforce from central Europe had the predictable and long-awaited effect of increasing the salaries of the domestic workforce in those industries.
The EU, in short, was never free trade: it was more like a magazine subscription. The British people looked at the quality of the magazine and decided it wasn’t value for money – and with the changes that have come down the track since, thank God we did.
This article appeared on Matt Goodwin on June 25, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
