By Lord David Frost

To mark the ten year anniversary of the EU referendum on Tuesday 23 June 2026, UK in a Changing Europe organised a major confernece with Flint Global. This is a shortened and edited version of a speech delivered by the Rt Hon. Lord David Frost.

Brexit did get done all those ten years ago – and a lot of people still seem very unhappy about it. It really is remarkable how much of the British governing class remains unreconciled to that decision ten years on: how angry they still feel, how badly they want to undo it. That’s why I want to make the best case I can for why the vote to Leave was the right one, why Britain can succeed outside the EU, and why the Rejoin movement would do better to make its peace with the result.

Let me preface this with an obvious truth: the case for Remain and the case for Leave were finely balanced. It comes down to where you stand on a set of trade-offs amounting overall to whether it is better to run your own affairs directly, or to hold a share in a larger unit. In British conditions, those trade-offs stack up in favour of national independence.

First comes the democratic reason – and it is the fundamental one. Within the EU, in important areas, the laws that govern European countries simply cannot, in practice, be changed at national elections. What a country pays into the EU budget; its trade and energy policy; who may become a citizen, and much, much more. Where laws are set at EU level,  these can be changed only by cross-European agreement, not at the national ballot box.

This is a clear recipe for disenchantment. When people cannot change things at elections, they either switch off or vote for anti-system “populist” parties.  That is what we have seen across the EU. The strongest case for Brexit is just this: that we now have a chance to escape that trap. We can now debate everything in our Parliament, and change it.  British democracy is coming back.

The second reason is that we were never comfortable with the EU’s direction of travel. Britain never shared the project’s goals.  There was never  strong backing here for a federal destination, for an emotional European ideal. For more than twenty years, we were the awkward partner. Half-membership pleased no one.

The third advantage is that independence lets you adjust to circumstances – and correct your own mistakes. All governments make mistakes; the real question is how quickly you can put them right. We got the post-Brexit migration system badly wrong – but the point is that we can now change it.  In foreign affairs, maybe many want to tilt to Europe now, but who knows what the future holds?  Independence is optionality – and in an uncertain world, that is worth a great deal.

Fourth – and I know this is unfashionable – controlling who comes into your country really does matter. Borders, after all, are what make a country a country. Before 2020 we had no control at all over EU migration; now we do. Maintaining a country as a country – the shared identification with a history and a culture – is crucial to keeping it a meaningful democracy.

All these arguments together point to a larger truth: self-government restores responsibility. A country which knows that its own government is responsible for outcomes has every incentive to govern well – a healthier discipline than a system in which failure can always be blamed on someone else.

So: democracy, adaptability, control, choice and responsibility. These are what being outside the EU gives you, and nothing since 2016 has undermined them.

The economy is of course the great battleground of the moment, with ever more hysterical reports telling us that leaving has been a catastrophe. My argument is not that every consequence of Brexit has been cost-free. It is that the costs have been overstated and the benefits of policy freedom understated.

I see three fallacies in the current economic debate.  The first involves the “doppelganger” studies.  I just can’t take them seriously. It is plainly unsound to compare our economy chiefly with America’s, or with economies utterly unlike ours, such as Estonia’s. They tell us that, had we done what America has done, we would have grown faster. We know that.  But we didn’t.

The second relates to the simpler approaches – the much-quoted costings from the OBR – which only ever look at one side of the ledger. I will concede a modest cost from leaving the customs union and the single market, around 1 to 1.5%. But these numbers take no account of the gains from policy freedom here in the UK – and especially of our independence from the EU’s heavy-handed regulation of AI and digital services, worth in my view that 1-1.5% on its own. Set the two side by side, and you arrive at a figure as close to zero as makes no difference.

The third fallacy is the assumption that, if you have paid a cost to leave, you must get it all back when you rejoin. But why should that be so, once the economy has begun to adjust? Rejoining simply involves another cost. Re-banning the plant-protection products now permitted in the UK would cost £500 to £800 million a year – which alone outweighs the Government’s claimed £600 million benefit from the SPS reset.

So I deny that you can point to any meaningful economic cost, overall, from having left. I worry much of the economics profession is engaged in motivated reasoning. They told us there would be a recession after we voted to leave – and there wasn’t. They have been relentlessly negative, and relentlessly wrong. I only wish they would stop obsessing about Brexit, not because it is annoying to me, but because it is crowding out the focus we so badly need on our real economic problems.

Still, all this noise is why I am unsurprised that the polls have drifted a little towards Rejoin. Everyone has had a hard decade, and Brexit makes a convenient culprit. But scratch the surface – ask people where they actually want power to sit – and the enthusiasm evaporates. A poll by Queen Mary University last autumn found that, of twenty major policy areas that had rested with the EU, people overwhelmingly wanted them kept in Britain. I am willing to believe people want better relations with the EU – but not that there is any majority for subjecting ourselves to EU law with no say in it.

I don’t blame the EU for the point we have reached. I blame our own leaders. What none of the current government seems to have considered is that the TCA might actually be a good deal – and that the best future for Britain is to accept being an independent country and to make it work: a friend and partner of the EU on defence and security, and a competitor, with a different economic model, in others.

So my message is simple. Stop trying to reopen the decision, stop pretending that partial dependence on the EU is a good outcome, and start doing what independent countries are supposed to do: govern themselves well. That, in the end, is the prize. Not isolation. Not nostalgia. Not hostility to Europe. But democratic self-government – and the confidence to make it work.

The Rt Hon Lord Frost CMG., former Minister of State and chief Brexit negotiator. Source: UK in Changing Europe