Boris Johnson: Please Vote Leave on Thursday, because we’ll never get this chance again

Highlights from Boris Johnson’s final pre-referendum Telegraph column.

When you pick up your ballot paper this Thursday, you have it in your hands to transform Britain’s current democratic arrangements for the better. You can change the whole course of European history – and if you vote Leave, I believe that change will be overwhelmingly positive.

What is the Remain camp offering? Nothing. No change, no improvement, no reform; nothing but the steady and miserable erosion of parliamentary democracy in this country.

If Britain votes to Remain in the EU, then we continue to be subject to an increasingly anti-democratic system that is now responsible for 60 per cent of the law that goes through Westminster – a phenomenon that contributes so powerfully to the modern voter’s apathy, the sensation that we no longer control our destiny, and that voting changes nothing.

Finally the Remainers are now desperately trying to suggest that anyone who wants to Leave is somehow against the spirit of modern Britain; against openness, tolerance, decency. What nonsense – and what an insult to the people of all races and parties and ages and beliefs who simply want to take back control of this country’s democracy.

Think of what we can achieve if we vote Leave. We can take back control of huge sums of money – £10.6 billion net per year – and spend it on our priorities. We can take back control of our borders, and install an Australian-style points-based system that is fair both to people coming from the EU and from non-EU countries.

We can do global trade deals that even the EU commission itself believes could generate another 300,000 jobs. Above all we could take back control of our powers to pass laws and set tax rates in the interest of the UK economy. We can reorientate the UK economy to the whole world, rather than confining ourselves to an EU that now amounts to only 15 per cent of global GDP.

Now is the time to believe in ourselves, and in what Britain can do, and to remember that we always do best when we believe in ourselves. Of course we can continue to provide leadership and support for Europe – but intergovernmentally, outside the supranational EU system.

Why shouldn’t we do this? When in the history of this country have we gone wrong by believing in self-government?