What the Brexit Party’s ‘contract with the people’ (not manifesto) says about Brexit

Today the Brexit Party has published a 24-page booklet it is calling its Contract with the People – they refuse to use the term ‘manifesto’ as they say it has become “a dirty word”. The document states:

“Everybody knows that a manifesto is little more than a set of vague promises that its authors have no intention of keeping. By contrast, our Contract with the People is a targeted set of deliverable pledges.”

It also notes at an early stage:

“We are not seeking election as a government. We are seeking to deliver the Brexit that we were promised three and a half years ago.”

The document does not touch on the nature of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, but rather declares that its “priority is to Leave the European Union and deliver the Brexit that 17.4m voted for in 2016”, repeatedly using the term “clean-break Brexit”. It states that “Leaving the undemocratic EU is just the beginning. It will be the first step in a political revolution. We want fundamental democratic reforms to fix our broken political system and make Parliament serve the People”.

Leaving the EU will free up £13 billion a year which the party says “can form part of a Brexit dividend to invest billions in Britain’s Regions, cut the cost of living, and build a better future for millions of our people”. It continues:

“With a Clean-Break Brexit, we can start changing Britain for good from day one. There will be no extended ‘transition period’, no more years of wrangling with Brussels, no further entanglement with the EU’s controlling political institutions.”

The following feature among the proposals in the document:

• Invest £2.5bn in our Fishing and Coastal Communities: with a Clean-Break Brexit we recover control of a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (or the median line), creating the opportunity to regenerate our coastal communities with new investment, jobs and tourism.
• Freed from EU rules on state aid, we can invest in strategic industries such as steel, railways and defence to create thousands of jobs.
• EU rules stop us reducing our VAT rates. We will zero rate VAT on domestic fuel to reduce energy bills — saving an average £65 per household.
• Reduce import tariffs: 20% of UK food items are sourced from outside the EU. A Clean-Break Brexit will allow us to reduce tariffs to zero on certain foods, footwear and clothing.
• Maintain subsidies and grants paid by the EU to UK businesses such as farmers, fisheries, universities and research bodies.
• Provide transitional relief to key sectors such as the automotive industry, to ensure a smooth Brexit.
• Create Freeports in certain regions to encourage investment and create new jobs.
• Withdraw from the European Defence Union. This will mean we leave the EU defence procurement directive ensuring the UK has the right to stipulate defence contracts stay at home.
• Reduce annual immigration and address wage stagnation and the skills gap by introducing a fair points system that is blind to ethnic origin.

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* This article was originally published here