'That's not true': Minister's reason Brexit is a success immediately shut down

Today is the third anniversary of Brexit - did you get it a card?

Three years ago, after four years of bureaucracy and negotiations following the referendum, the UK left the shackles of Europe and we emerged blinking into the light ready to enjoy all the benefits that being a weaker trading partner with shiny news passports would surely bring.

Since then the policy has barely been out of the news as we've seen supply-chain issues, traffic jams in Dover and businesses going bust thanks in part to good old Brexit so what does the government have to say for itself on the matter?

It fell upon Richard Holden, a minister in the Department for Transport to today advocate for the Tory policy.

But it went pretty badly when, during an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, he was told one of his so-called Brexit "achievements" was "not true".

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Ferrari had asked him what Brexit had achieved and Holden named the Covid vaccine.

"The biggest impact we've seen over the last couple years is probably Britain's ability to fulfill its own vaccine programme..." he said before Ferrari cut him off.

"You'll be aware of course the independent website FullFact say 'that's not true' and even the boss of our own MHRA Dr June Raine has also said 'that's not true' so can we strike that one out?" the presenter retorted.

"You're absolutely right you could have done it within the EU," Holden conceded.

But he added: "The pressure if we'd been in the EU to be part of a EU scheme would have been quite unbelievable."

He added that Brexit meant the UK could set its own procurement rules to give British preference (look how well that went) and said trade was also going well thanks to the policy.

Brexit enables the UK "to trade more nimbly and to respond more quickly to emerging markets as well which is where the growth in the future is going to come from," he said.

Oh dear. The MP's car-crash interview comes as Guy Hands, a leading City figure, has called Brexit a “complete disaster” and a “bunch of total lies” that has harmed large parts of the economy.

“It’s been a complete disaster," the former Tory donor told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "The reality is it’s been a lose-lose situation for us and Europe. Europe has lost more [in financial services] but we’ve lost as well. And the reality of Brexit was, it was just was a bunch of complete and total lies.

“The only way that the Brexit put forward by Boris Johnson was going to work was if there was a complete deregulation of the UK and we moved to a sort of Liz Truss utopia of a Singapore state and that was just never going to happen,” he said.

“The British population was never going to accept a state in which the NHS would be demolished, where free education would be severely limited, where regulation with regard to employment would be thrown apart. It was just complete and total absolute lies.”

He added: “The biggest issue about it, and you can take the Brexit bus as a good example, is the lies that Boris Johnson and the Conservative party told about the NHS. In fact what they did was throw the country and the NHS under the bus.”

But thank goodness we have BRITISH jabs in BRITISH arms... none of that foreign muck!

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