FINALLY .. A Brexit benefit?

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Right now in Westminster, something absolutely extraordinary is happening and the political class is desperately hoping that you won't notice.

[00:00:10]Rachel Reeves, Labour's Chancellor, lifelong remainer, just stood up in Parliament and handed British shoppers a Brexit dividend.

[00:00:21]Not because she wanted to, because she had no choice.

[00:00:25]And that tells you pretty much everything. If you care about your weekly shopping bill, your cost of living, and whether the politicians who told you Brexit was a disaster are finally being forced to eat their words, hit subscribe because quite honestly, we need to talk.

[00:00:46]So, here's what happened. Just yesterday, Rachel Reeves announced she's cutting import tariffs on more than 100 food products. Things like baked beans, biscuits, uh tomato ketchup, crisps, margarine.

[00:01:02]All to help with the cost of living squeeze.

[00:01:05]That move is expected to save consumers approximately 150 million pounds per year.

[00:01:13]Now, Rachel Reeves is framing this as a response to the uh Iran war pushing up global prices.

[00:01:21]Fine.

[00:01:23]That's the reason she's doing it now.

[00:01:25]But here's the thing that nobody in the mainstream media wants to say out loud.

[00:01:31]She can only do this because of Brexit.

[00:01:35]Full stop. End of sentence.

[00:01:37]If we were still in the EU, this announcement would have been impossible.

[00:01:42]Trade policy belongs to Brussels.

[00:01:46]Tariff rates are set by the Customs Union.

[00:01:50]We'd have been completely powerless.

[00:01:53]Under the EU Customs Union, tariffs are set on a common external basis. The UK had no ability to adjust them independently.

[00:02:06]That freedom only came back to us when we left.

[00:02:11]And while this is going on, we've got a fascinating little drama playing out up in Wigan.

[00:02:17]Andy Burnham, the man who wants to be your next Prime Minister, he's trying to win the Makerfield by-election. As recently as last year's Labour conference, he said publicly, and I quote, "Long-term, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to say it. I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin."

[00:02:43]Then someone pointed out that Makerfield voted strongly for Brexit back in 2016, which makes things a little bit awkward.

[00:02:54]Suddenly, Burnham's gone very quiet on the whole EU thing.

[00:02:59]He's now ruling out pushing Britain to rejoin, saying the country should not rerun those arguments about Brexit.

[00:03:10]A slight flip-flopping, which Labour are getting quite used to.

[00:03:16]Meanwhile, Wes Streeting, who wants Burnham's job, used his first public comments after quitting the cabinet to declare that leaving the EU had been a catastrophic mistake. And that Britain's future lies back inside it.

[00:03:32]So, you've got two men who both want to be Prime Minister. One says he wants to rejoin, but he's hiding it during a by-election. The other is saying it loudly, and neither of them can explain why their own Chancellor is right now exercising a power that only exists because we left.

[00:03:55]This is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the Labour Party's position on Brexit.

[00:04:03]Now, let me explain why this tariff is actually a bigger deal than the 150 million that Rachel Reeves mentioned because the headline figure is almost deliberately misleading.

[00:04:15]Think about it this way. Let's say a tin of baked beans costs a pound.

[00:04:20]There's a 16% tariff on American beans coming in.

[00:04:25]You strip that tariff off, the price drops, let's say to 84 p. But here's where it gets interesting. The cheaper price doesn't just apply to the American beans.

[00:04:37]Your Canadian supplier, your existing supplier, suddenly has to compete at that new lower price or it loses your business. So, everyone drops their price. You didn't just cut the cost of American beans, you reset the floor price for the entire category. And then it compounds through the whole supply chain. The cafe that bought the beans at 84 p instead of a pound and applies their usual 50% markup, they're now charging you £1.26 instead of £1.50.

[00:05:12]You saved 24 p on a tin of beans and that came from a 16% cut at source.

[00:05:21]That's the geared effect. Multiply that across hundreds of product categories and the real saving to British households is multiple times the Treasury's 150 million figure.

[00:05:36]And that makes it even more significant because that is charged on top of the tariff.

[00:05:44]So, a 16% tariff effectively becomes nearly 20% when you include the VAT on top of it.

[00:05:52]This is real money, real savings on things real people buy every week.

[00:05:59]Here's the bigger picture though. Reeves said that her number one priority is protecting households from rising costs and she's pledging that supermarkets pass on those tariff savings in full and will hold them to that.

[00:06:14]But the honest version of her statement should be, "My number one priority is protecting households using a tool that people in this party spent years telling us was a disaster."

[00:06:28]But we should go further. There are products we simply don't grow or make in this country like oranges, lemons, and certain vegetables where tariffs serve no purpose except to push up your shopping bill. No British farmer loses out if we scrap a tariff on Moroccan oranges. We're just making food more expensive for no reason.

[00:06:55]Brexit effectively gave us back the power to do something about that and the fact that a Labour Chancellor is finally, reluctantly, doing it proves that that leave campaign may well have been right.

[00:07:12]So next time someone tells you Brexit was a disaster ask them why the government is using Brexit powers to bring your food bills down.

[00:07:23]Ask them why the man who wants to replace Starmer is hiding his EU views in a leave voting constituency and ask them what else we could do if we had politicians brave enough to actually use the freedoms that we all voted for.

[00:07:45]If you found this useful, share it with someone that needs to hear it. Subscribe if you haven't already, and drop a comment.

[00:07:52]Do you think Labour will ever admit Brexit might be working?

[00:07:57]I'll see you in the next one.