IEA Director General Mark Littlewood wrote in The Times urging the government to finally take advantage of Brexit freedoms seven years on from the vote to leave.

Mark wrote:

“Once Brexit finally happened in February 2020, there is then the question of what we do within our new status. So traumatic had been the post-referendum wranglings that all sides started to treat Brexit more as an event than a process. The Conservatives’ campaign slogan to “Get Brexit Done” in 2019 was aimed at least as much at voters who simply had got bored with the entire constitutional psychodrama as it was at enthusiastic Leavers. Unfortunately, that has limited the scope of those who want to actually do something constructive within the new Brexit landscape.

“An analogy would be that you make a finely balanced and rather difficult decision to sell your house. Much as your present lodgings have some meaningful benefits, you just don’t think they are quite fit for your purposes any longer. After years of complex and detailed wrangling, you finally manage to secure a sale. However, you haven’t paid any real attention to what new home you’d like to buy. Therefore you spend the next few years wandering the streets ruminating on whether you really made the right decision about selling up and largely clueless about what you’ll do next.

“This, more or less, is what we have done so far with our Brexit freedoms. A meaningful strategy of determining where to diverge from the EU on regulation has effectively been shelved, with only a few hundred tiny strips of red tape now scheduled for the scrapheap.”

Read Mark’s full piece here.