Rory Stewart

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?

I'm standing up as a member of parliament.

You've elected me.

I'm going to be a dynamic government.

I'm going to get things done.

What real issues were there where that applied?

Well, it turns out, and this is the problem, that firstly, that many of those regulations we wanted to keep anyway.

And partly it's dishonesty, right?

So instead of saying...

The reason why you can't do whatever you want to do on water quality is because of a European Union regulation on clean water.

Which has driven up the quality of our water.

We would have had to say, we want clean water or we want dirty water.

Or if they said, Minister...

You can't plant all these trees because something in the Common Agricultural Policy doesn't allow the use of the single farm payment for that.

If they went to the Union of the Green Union, they would have had to be more honest and said, the way we've designed our farm support package wouldn't allow you to use it for this.

The real indicator of why this went wrong is that we haven't got... I imagine one of the only benefits of Brexit might be that we'd get a bit more accountability and a bit more trust in government.