It may not feel or sound like it but Keir Starmer is a born-again Brexiteer. His achievements in office may be nugatory, his search for a legacy tragicomic, but there are countless actions this government boasts of which simply would not have been possible if we had stayed in the EU.

Earlier this year, Labour moved to protect our steel industry with a tariff package possible only because we have an independent trade policy. I was delighted this month when the minister in the Lords made it clear this was a Brexit benefit. Those same Brexit freedoms allowed the Chancellor last month to cut tariffs on more than 100 foodstuffs to ease the cost-of-living crisis. Both the Prime Minister and Chancellor have lauded trade deals with India and the US – arrangements with the world’s two largest democracies – more preferential than any the EU could secure.

And trade isn’t even the half of it. Relaxations of EU regulation in the City have brought new business. Operating outside the EU’s Digital Markets Act, our tech sector is outstripping continental neighbours. We have a decisive edge in AI and a globally respected AI Security Institute, which could not have been established in the EU. We are, albeit slowly, as Matt Ridley reports on page 18, developing gene-edited crops with higher yields and a less toxic environmental footprint. We have even imposed, as Bridget Phillipson delights in reminding us, VAT on private school fees. None of this would have been possible without Brexit.

I recognise that some of these steps may not be to your taste. But the key to all these policies is that we can, should we choose, amend, reverse or double down on them as we, the British people, wish. And that’s the biggest Brexit benefit of all: we are a full parliamentary democracy once more. We have taken back control.

We are a full parliamentary democracy once more. We have taken back control

We are a full parliamentary democracy once more. We have taken back control

Ten years on from that historic vote – when more of us voted for one single cause than have ever voted before or since – we have been told that Brexit is at best a tawdry and compromised achievement, a sentimental indulgence in nostalgia, haute gammonry at its worst and a self-inflicted wound that makes seppuku look like keyhole surgery.

Those who make that argument are the same people who told us that Brexit would usher in a cataclysmic recession, that it would make us Vladimir Putin’s poster child, that it would lead to the erasure of the City of London as a financial centre and a flight of talent that would leave Britain a yokel backwater. In short, the kind of experts from organisations with acronyms who have got things consistently wrong in the past.

The reality has been different: Britain is growing at least as fast as our major European........

© The Spectator