Rory Stewart

But the problem that they face is that

all the polling suggests there is almost no support amongst the public.

There is support amongst a small group of entrepreneurial businessmen who love Singapore, love Dubai.

That's why Rishi Sunak was quite interested in this.

Obviously, this was Liz Truss' vision.

But what did Liz Truss discover over her 49 days?

She discovered there was no support from the public or the markets for turning Britain into that kind of thing.

In fact, the problem actually

is that Britain isn't Singapore or Hong Kong or even the United States being held back by European manacle.

In many ways, our cultural social attitudes are very Scandinavian.

They're very sort of European.

So it turned out that what stopped us doing this wasn't being in the European Union.

It was us.

Another paradox.

I absolutely resonated with one of their points, right?

Totally want to grant one of the Brexiteers' points, which is that as an MP, I observed that we were blaming Europe all the time.

And there was a problem, I don't know, with sovereignty or accountability.

But again and again, if the public complained about something to the local council or their MP, they were told we couldn't do it because Europe wouldn't allow us to do it.

And civil servants would frequently say, you can't do that because European laws won't allow you to do it.

And I felt that was bad for our democracy, right?