Four years on from Brexit and the EU has become a dystopian nightmare, says Jacob Rees-Mogg

Remember that word directives: those ghastly bossy policies we had to follow and wasted money fretting about the curvature of bananas and cucumbers?

We have launched not just one bullet, but several magazines of bullets fired as if from a Gatling gun. We have dodged a whopping 4500 directives since our departure which equates to about 451 miles of paper if printed out and placed end to end.

So let's have a look at some of these directives that we have missed: The EU's gender directive, which requires that listed companies have 40% of non-executive directors or 33% of all directors, being members of the underrepresented sex by the middle of 2026: inevitably sacrificing meritocracy on the altar of diversity and inclusion.

It seems the EU has become an ESG dystopian nightmare since we left. For example, the corporate sustainability reporting directive, which is just bureaucratic in and of itself. It requires large firms to report on their ESG ratings.

It’s also even more obsessed than ever with the green agenda. Take the land use directive, which is set to expropriate land from landowners all in the name of greenery. And we see a similar phenomenon with the ‘Fit for 55’ initiative or the nature restoration law, which forces landowners to turn their fields into marshland.

These directives underlie the recent disorder seen in France; the riots, the burning, the blocking of roads, and similarly in Germany and the Netherlands.

The unaccountable, undemocratic EU is to some extent getting its comeuppance as people realise they don't like these directives, which we have missed.

But we've also not missed out on any trade deals because the EU hasn't done any.

It's still struggling to get its trade deal with Australia completed because the EU doesn't like free trade. We managed to reach an Australian free trade agreement in under two years of leaving the EU.

And this is where the fabled cheaper food and wine will come from; its free trade deals with agricultural countries that can provide good quality products to us at lower prices.

The EU, on the other hand, has just withdrawn from trade negotiations with a block of South American countries because of French farmers attempting to establish a sixth Republic.

We've replicated 40 of the 43 deals we had as members of the EU as well as negotiating FTAs with Australia and New Zealand. We’ve improved deals with Singapore, Ukraine and Japan. We're in negotiations with India and the Gulf Cooperation Council and we've improved our deals with Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, and Israel - none of which we could have done from within the EU because trade was EU competence.

Not to mention the fact that we've joined and we were legislating just on Monday for the CPTPP bloc, projected to outgrow the EU enormously overcoming decades.

All of this and yet UK EU trade is up since we left.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on the EU; let’s look at the economy. The Euro zone and EU growth for 2022 was 3.33% and 3.61% respectively. The UK outgrew both measures with 4.3%.

What if we look country by country? Since we left, our economy has outgrown the French economy. The German economy, the manufacturing hub of Europe, actually entered into a recession last year.

The UK-hating IMF thought the UK would be the only economy to contract in 2023, but we grew and the only economy to shrink in the G7 was in fact, the poor old Germans.

Now that doesn't mean we're in the land of milk and honey, there are always problems. But the lesson of the statistics is that we're doing pretty well outside the EU.

So to our friends and neighbours in Brussels, it was fun while it lasted, well, not really. But today on the fourth anniversary of our departure, I can claim that we have no regrets.”