Today is the tenth anniversary of the vote by Britons to leave the European Union. It was an achievement that has not been matched by any other EU nation so far. No nation apart from Britain has voted to leave this sclerotic, economically crashing Union.

The Leave process has not been easy. The vote on June 23^rd 2016 was just the start of the battle. The British Establishment has attempted to thwart the British people’s will at every turn using legal and Parliamentary tricks to try to reverse or ignore the vote. Even now ten years on we are not completely free of EU influence and Ulster continues to be hampered by rules drawn up by politicians who made grave errors and who caved into pressure put upon the British government by Governments pushing the EU line such as the Republic of Ireland.

Did the Vote Leave campaign make mistakes, sure they did. They didn’t have the sort of post referendum plan that might have avoided some of the problems that came after the vote. It’s one thing to win a vote but it is quite another to be able to use the power of the referendum result effectively. Not having a solid plan left all sorts of avenues open for the opponents of Brexit to create trouble and blocks to post EU success. Maybe if there’d been better planning by Leave then we might not have had some of the monstrous things that have marred Britain over the last decade. We might not have had politicians who would have eviscerated our energy sector, opened up Britain’s borders to the dross of the world nor the legislative burdens that have hampered industry and which have had second order negative effects such as making waste disposal more burdensome and expensive. However the referendum win means that we the British people can replace these terrible British politicians with better ones, something which was difficult or impossible to do before the referendum when no matter who we voted for we got the policies that the EU wanted.

Not all that we might have hoped has been achieved by the Brexit vote. However that’s not the fault of the vote itself or even the reason for the vote or even the concept of leaving the EU, the things that have gone wrong are the fault of the political classes who were supposed to implement the vote to the satisfaction of the British people.

When I look at the state of EU nations with their sluggish economies, anti freedom policies, porous borders and oppressive and business killing legislative landscape I still believe that Britons made the correct decision to vote Leave. We may have been let down by British politicians in the implementation of the voters decision but we the British people can change that whereas we could not change the situation before the vote to leave the EU.

Happy Independence Day Britain.