The country has changed its mind and I have too — but in the opposite direction. Almost ten years since we voted to leave the EU, polls now suggest that most people think we should have remained or would rejoin. I was a Remainer, but today, I would vote to stay out, or leave.

I bring it up because Labour, already exhausted, is rattling around in the back of the broom cupboard for the old biscuit tin labelled “closer ties with Europe”. We are told that its “youth mobility scheme” (free movement, but just for “youth”) will be controlled by an “emergency brake”. Rachel Reeves wants “closer alignment”. And Sir Keir Starmer is preparing his big “reset” summit next month.

A decade ago, stay or leave was the first big call I had to make as a columnist. I had just joined The Daily Telegraph and the careerist thing to do was to side with the paper’s readers and editorial line in voting out. But I had spent six years covering different parts of the corporate world and I didn’t see much hunger for an entrepreneurial restart of the British state from businesses I wrote about. Some finance types privately admitted that their “heart said out” but their “head said stay”.

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They were all morbidly afraid of losing political access in Brussels, where Treasury officials tied everyone up in knots, supposedly in the national interest. I sat through an enactment of Brexit negotiations and concluded the EU would, to use the technical term, absolutely screw us. And there was a feeling of cultural affinity with European friends. So I opted for Remain. But I now think it was the wrong call.

I am sure that sounds deeply weird to most people. Even Brexit’s most ardent supporters wince when asked what it has achieved. But since 2016, Britain’s troubles have vindicated the essential argument: that autonomy and manoeuvrability matter more than scale or legal practice. Large economic zones or political configurations are neither inherently safer nor richer.

The arrogance shown by the reverse-Brexit crew did not help their cause. But more important was the realisation that the country was not doing all right. Wages were stagnant, whole regions were in decay and we were (and are) propping up a broken model using low interest rates, debt, cheap imports and ever-greater influxes of immigration. It’s a model whose terrifying vulnerabilities are increasingly obvious. And so what’s needed is not a defensive consolidation of our current advantages but strategic and radical change.

The slow, remote and politically dysfunctional structures of the EU do not make it easy to achieve this change. They entrench timidity, coddle vested interests, insulate our administrative class in a way that lets cosmopolitan ideologies run amok and help us deny responsibility for our problems. The EU was certainly not the only or even the greatest source of these tendencies and so leaving was never the solution in itself. But it was a prerequisite.

Perhaps you can construct theoretical scenarios in which we could have brought about a revolution in political culture from inside. But if you actually confront the way our courts, mandarins, lobby groups and even politicians use human rights law, treaties and EU directives to thwart change and build a culture of ideological insularity, it becomes clear that membership of overbearing legal structures like the EU is a serious obstacle to change.

In placid times, this is tolerable. But times are unstable and our problems are urgent. Look at the EU’s response to this urgency. Since the UK left, Brussels has passed at least two bumper packages of legislation, one known as the “digital omnibus” on data and AI, the other on climate. The “omnibus” has moved the EU into the digital slow lane, with new product rollouts like Microsoft CoPilot or AirPod-enabled live translation delayed and the compliance burden on new AI factory safety or cancer diagnoses tools so severe that even Brussels has been forced into a rethink. This is at a time when the world’s most powerful economies are racing for supremacy and using their technological edge to coerce others.

In energy policy, the EU has doubled down on an approach that even its own central bank said is forcing European industry — already among the lowest-carbon in the world — to relocate abroad. Yet its package to reduce emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030, called “Fit for 55” (a slogan only a bunch of gerontocrats could find inspiring), is expected to send the region’s carbon price rocketing and slap a carbon tariff on top. Labour, naturally, has said we will follow this carbon pricing regime, whatever the cost to British industry, for the extremely meagre benefit of cutting energy trading costs.

Of course, we are capable of shooting ourselves in the foot without Brussels’ help, as North Sea policy shows. But when there is suddenly an appetite for radical change, even leftover EU law is still in the way. Last month, for example, the government announced plans to bypass the EU habitats directive to get more nuclear power plants built, for which it may well need a specific EU trade deal exemption. Even if it gets one, this is using up time and energy we just don’t have.

Brexit sceptics ask for the alternative. We should look to our Covid-era vaccine task force. Putting aside the argument about whether the task force could have existed without Brexit (technically yes, but politically it was unlikely), its success in procuring the best vaccines faster than almost any rival proved that you don’t need scale and procedure. It is far more important to be nimble, willing to take calculated risks and free from regulatory meddling. No wonder it took a venture capitalist who backs entrepreneurs for a living to pull it off, and not a global corporate manager of the kind I often interviewed.

Labour is not interested in models of success, however. It is plugging away with its dreary “reset”, promising to follow various sets of EU rules to no obvious benefit. Even the plodding Starmerites at the Institute for Government admit that “so far, the EU has done better at securing its objectives”. Well blow me down. It’s almost as if this is a mug’s game.

What, anyway, are we trying to achieve by reintegrating our legal system with a bunch of countries in exactly the same rut as us? Maybe it will do away with some passport queues and export hassle (or maybe not). But is it going to change our destiny? How is any of it going to help us do what’s necessary: replace half the civil service with AI, curtail legal delays, restore our dynamism, end reliance on immigration, and secure public support to spend less on welfare and more on industry, science and defence?

To do these things, you need a vigorous state free to tear up the rules, champion Britain’s strengths and take risks. Compared with the opportunity, the costs of Brexit are a rounding error. And with every new crisis, the need for radicalism becomes clearer.