By what measure has Brexit delivered a better life for people in Britain? - Andy Brown

The public was, for example, told by David Davies MP that there would be no downsides if we voted to leave the EU. He was rewarded for this piece of great wisdom by being appointed as the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU for two years. The rest of us don’t seem to have been so well rewarded.

Whatever way you voted in the Brexit referendum it is very hard to carry on believing that things have turned out as you hoped and the whole thing has been a great success.

We were told we’d find it easy to carry on frictionless trade with the rest of Europe because we held all the negotiating cards. The actual experience of our exporters has been a nightmare of extra bureaucracy and additional costs that have impacted on inflation. The government has still to apply full import controls on EU goods and services because it is afraid of the impact.

We were promised that there would be large quantities of our own money back which we could use to provide extra funding for much valued British public services like the NHS and to level up the regions. Where is the money? It is hard to find any part of the public sector which isn’t suffering from over a decade of under investment and isn’t struggling with rising costs. As for levelling up it is only necessary to walk through the streets of the more deprived areas of Yorkshire to see the reality.

We were meant to be entering a brave new world of independent economic success. What has happened instead has been the worst squeeze on living standards of ordinary people in living memory.

We were told that the Northern Ireland problem would be easily sorted out without any impact on the province. The Unionist community is still refusing to return to the Northern Ireland Assembly because of its concerns over different treatment of two parts of the UK post Brexit and there is no obvious solution in sight.

We were asked to believe that the only way to have any properly effective controls over immigration was to leave the EU. Whatever your view on the benefits or downsides of a sensible degree of controlled immigration it is very hard to argue that what is happening now is well planned, carefully thought through and better organised than what existed before we left the EU.

We were told that the EU was a dangerous one size fits all super state that could never be reformed. The EU has recently decided to explore having different tiers of membership. Something that would have enabled Britain to lead a group of nations wanting to be in the EU without sacrificing sovereignty.

Those who told us in advance that there might be problems warned that it would be hard for our nation to prosper if we left the European single market. To many it seemed unwise in the extreme to give up easy access to the biggest market on our doorstep in the hope that we might strike good trade deals with more distant countries. The warnings were dismissed as coming from Remoaners who couldn’t see the wonderful nature of the opportunities. We’ve ended up with a worse trade deal with New Zealand than the EU recently signed and a deal with the distant Association of South East Asian Nations in return for losing our longstanding deal with our immediate neighbours.

Farmers who hoped that they would get better subsidy schemes once they were out of the clumsy and inefficient EU Common Agricultural Policy may now be more inclined to listen to other farmers who warned the new trade deals would bring in unfair competition and their voice would be weaker.

Back in 2016 we were offered a choice between the hope of something different and better or the threats that things would get worse. A small majority of the British public understandably opted for hope.

When that hope turns out to have been quite so completely unfounded there comes a time when even the most enthusiastic advocate of Britain forging its own way in the world might be wise to question whether they have been sold a pup.

There will be those who conclude that Brexit has failed because it hasn’t been done hard enough for long enough and who will be asking us to take even more economic risks. Like Liz Truss did.

A lot of other, more sober minded, folk are starting to think that, just maybe, those who warned us in advance that leaving the EU was a mistake might have a point. The quicker we re-think and re-join the smaller the damage.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.