Michael Gove: Brexit offers the chance to take back control of our own borders

We’ll discover the truth, or otherwise, of that when the votes are counted next Thursday night.

In all my years in journalism and politics, I have never seen such a sustained campaign of scare-mongering as that produced by the Remain camp in the last few months.

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Leaving the EU would result in not only World War Three, we’re told, but, according to Donald Tusk, the President of the Council of Ministers, the actual collapse of western civilisation.

The word “risk” has been deployed 100 times a day by the Remain campaign to describe the possibility of our leaving the EU.

I believe the word “opportunity” is a far more appropriate way to describe that event, should it come to pass.

For the first time in more than four decades we will have the opportunity to forge new trade deals with emerging economies.

We may celebrate our heritage and history as a trading nation, but as an EU member we are legally prevented from pursuing such deals.

Yet because the EU must negotiate on behalf of all 28 of its member states, each with its own, often conflicting, priorities, such negotiations are never simple and always prolonged. Even after nine years, the much-anticipated deal with one of our most important customers, India, is still not completed.

A vote to leave will also give us the opportunity to take back control of our own borders – an opportunity that most countries globally take for granted but which, within the EU, is simply not allowed.

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I absolutely reject the hatred of the extremists who oppose all immigration. Immigration has benefited our country and our communities immensely over the years, and will do so in the future. But immigration only benefits a country when it can be controlled, managed and limited.

Throughout our history, and particularly in the decades since the end of the Second World War, we have welcomed foreign workers and their families as they arrived and made Scotland and the UK their home. We should be, and are, proud of that fact.

But our people were always assured by our government that they would limit numbers arriving in order that local services would not be overwhelmed.

Today, those assurances cannot be made. Just as it is illegal for an EU member to forge its own trade deals, so it is illegal for us, within the EU, to limit or manage immigration from other EU countries.

Yet with Scotland facing skills shortages in key sectors, why must a dentist from Toronto or a doctor from Shanghai stand in line behind a low-skilled worker from Budapest?

And on June 23, we can also take the opportunity to strengthen the Scottish Parliament. Donald Dewar, the founder of Holyrood, future-proofed devolution. He constructed the Scotland Act deliberately to make sure that when new powers emerged in the future, powers that neither he nor anyone else could foresee at the time, they would automatically become the domain of Holyrood rather than Westminster. The device he used was simple: a list of reserved powers in the Scotland Act – anything that fell outside that list would be devolved.

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So, for example, when media regulation became a possibility after the Leveson report was published, there was no discussion at Westminster about who should take responsibility for it in Scotland. It was not included in Donald’s list of reserved powers, and so Holyrood took charge.

The same will happen with those powers currently wielded over Scotland by the European Commission in Brussels. Inheriting fishing policy, in particular, gives Scottish Ministers at Holyrood a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reinvigorate an industry that has been decimated by the European Common Fisheries Policy.

And a vote to leave will strengthen Holyrood in another way: no longer will policies supported by the Scottish people and subsequently endorsed by our elected representatives at Holyrood – such as minimum pricing of alcohol – be able to be overturned by unelected judges at the European Court of Justice.

Some will tell us that the EU can only be reformed from within, that the UK needs to take a leadership role within it. Yet as David Cameron found out at the start of this year, the EU isn’t willing to reform, even with the threat of an in/out referendum hanging over it.

And why would other nations in the EU look to us for leadership when we have (rightly) excluded ourselves from the EU’s two biggest projects – the euro and Schengen?

The EU is past its sell-by date. I can understand why, in a bygone age, it was seen as a necessary contraption by which to navigate the choppy seas of international commerce.

But its restrictions, its obligations and, importantly, its costs have made it simply too unwieldy and not fit for purpose in the 21st century.

We may never get the chance again to strike out – not on our own, but as an important member of the international community, trading freely and co-operating with our friends in the EU and beyond.