Over the past three years, those of us who voted for Brexit have been treated with scorn and contempt. We have been derided as a bunch of uneducated, bigoted tabloid readers living outside the M25. In an attempt to try to get us to change our minds, Members on both sides of the House—in and out—various banks and businesses and all sorts of remain-supporting groups have adopted a sort of “Project Fear” on steroids. We seem to get a more ludicrous scare story each week. We get told that there will be mass unemployment as a result of Brexit, but the next minute we are told that there will be a huge shortage of workers to fill all the jobs available.
We are told one minute that we will run out of food, and the next we are told that farmers will be ruined by all the cheap food imports. I was on the radio a few weeks ago with an academic, who said that 12,000 people will die due to a lack of fresh fruit and veg. Needless to say he is from London, because I could have shown him a few orchards in Monmouth where we grow plenty of fruit and vegetables.
These stories just get more and more silly. Last June the papers were saying that one of Britain’s top private general practitioners had reported a huge increase in adultery and venereal disease due to Brexit. There was a headline in the paper the following month saying that we would have super-gonorrhoea raging out of control due to Brexit. It almost came as a relief in September when another newspaper, it might even have been The Daily Telegraph, reported that there will be a shortage of Viagra as a result of Brexit. In the space of just three or four months, Britain had been turned from Sodom and Gomorrah into Eden before the fall as a result of Brexit. Those stories are frankly ludicrous, and they are not fooling anyone. They certainly do not fool me.
Two weeks ago, I went with members of the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs.to talk to some real experts at the port of Holyhead, one of the major crossing points to the Republic of Ireland.