Before writing this article, I reread the one I submitted to The Banker almost 15 months ago, during the Brexit referendum campaign in the UK. It was published only weeks after I had resigned as director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce in order to lead the business campaign to leave the EU.
I realised that the article was mainly a critique of what had gone wrong in the UK’s relationship with Europe and why the EU was in desperate need of reform in a way that would be recognisable to the UK, rather than the reform preferred by the Brussels autocracy: inexorable political and economic integration, protectionism, centralised control and the dead hand of bureaucracy.
