It is now time for us to start using our new freedoms

AS I WRITE this, I do so with a real sense of excitement. We have finally thrown off the shackles of the EU which had so dominated everything we do and are now a sovereign nation, making our own laws and finally out of the EU Customs Union and its Single Market.

- Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP

This has been a long journey for many of us. When I entered Parliament 29 years ago, I decided the Maastricht Treaty was a monumental power grab by the EU and couldn’t support it. I said that the UK would one day be forced to leave the EU because it was becoming a superstate.

With each treaty that followed, centralising more and more power in Brussels, UK governments became experts in misleading the British people, claiming that they hadn’t given up power when they had, feeding the EU’s insatiable appetite for more control.

In 1975 I, like many others, was persuaded that the UK was just going to join a marketplace that would help grow our economy. Yet many in the political establishment knew only too well that the real purpose of the EU was to create a supra-national state. In 1947 Lord Thorneycroft wrote that, “The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defences, not asked.”

It is worth recalling how not everyone was taken in. In the run-up to our joining the EEC, (“Common Market”) in 1973, the Express and Sunday Express were almost alone amongst the national newspapers in opposing the UK’s entry.