The last thing the UK should be doing is getting closer to slow-growth Europe. Our final 12 years in the EU following the 2008 crash were years of disappointing growth for us and the them followed by a Europe-wide covid lockdown crash. We watched with the rest of the EU as the US rushed ahead. All this century to date the US has been growing twice as fast as the EU. US income and output per head is now around double the EU average, with the UK only 20% above the EU. The reasons the EU has stumbled so badly were set out clearly and in agonising detail by Mr Draghi, former European Central Bank President and saviour of the Euro.

He pointed out that the EU has too many anti-business rules and regulations. It has failed to allow or create a single trillion dollar plus company whilst the US has grown several on the back of its leadership in digital technology. He has shown how the US dominates the list of leading world companies, generates more ideas and new businesses, has the world’s leading universities alongside a handful in the UK – and a great record for innovation.

Most commentators agree that imposing tariffs on trade is damaging to economic growth. The EU is very critical of President Trump’s tariffs, yet they insist on maintaining their own Customs Union with high tariff barriers against the rest of the world in a number of important areas like food.

Those in the UK who join the Liberal Democrats in wanting us to join the Customs Union are so wrong. Making us impose more and higher tariffs on our imports from the rest of the world would be bad for consumers and put up prices.

It would hurt manufacturers importing raw materials and components for assembly here. Post Brexit we were able to abolish a wide range of tariffs on things we do not produce or grow for ourselves and on the things industry needs to buy from abroad to lower their costs.

The idea that we could so boost our exports to the EU it would be worth paying them lots of money for a closer relationship was disproved by our membership.

Our trade with the EU as a member continued to decline as a percentage of our total trade as the rest of the world grew faster. More importantly more and more of our trade is now dependent on exporting services, not goods.

We have seen these exports storm ahead since Brexit, helped by trade agreements with the rest of the world that promote services. In the EU they usually did not include service provisions in trade deals or did not have a trade deal at all. We sell a lot more services to non-EU places.

It’s is one of those absurd ironies that at the very time people argue we could sell more goods to the EU if we had a better deal they want us to sign up to more EU carbon taxes and net zero rules.

That would finish the destruction of our traditional leading export sales to the continent. Our big exports lines included oil, gas, refined oil products and petrol and diesel cars. These are all on the EU and UK government list for closure, with high taxes and rules to speed their demise.

I wonder if these advocates of closer links remember we did sign a tariff-free trade deal with the EU on leaving, at considerable cost. It is untrue to say we have lost 4% or even 8% of our GDP to Brexit.

Our economy has outperformed Germany since we left and has usually grown a little above the EU average. Our slow growth needs a big injection of lower taxes, fewer bad rules and some American-style innovation, as Mr Draghi rightly recommended. It does not need another cold shower of extra EU tariffs, rules and taxes.

Our biggest Brexit win was saving large financial contributions to the EU, and allowing us to keep the customs dues and plastic tax revenues that the EU took from us.

Were we to seek to rejoin now the costs and tax loss would probably be around £25bn a year, more than doubling the Government’s much-challenged £20bn black hole. We could not afford it and it would not deliver us anything of value.

Why go back in when we know it is too dear, that it hurts our key industries, that it impedes our trade with the rest of the world, burdens us with bad regulations and keeps us firmly tied down in the slow lane of growth?

The UK has not taken nearly enough advantage of its Brexit freedoms, staying too chained to a bad EU economic model. That is what we need to alter.