Tom Elliott: '˜I voted out but I wasn't impressed by either campaign'

The Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP said: “The overall deal has not been made yet and won’t be for some time.”

Mr Elliott said he made a decision to vote to get out of the EU “away from the scare mongering that was going on”.

“I felt a lot of the policy and legal decisions particularly from the European court in Strasbourg, which makes policy issues which the general public don’t generally hear about but that affect our day-to-day lives, were on many occasions extremely restrictive, especially for small businesses in the UK,” he said.

“I said before that I wasn’t very impressed with either of the campaigns and I thought the campaigns were built on fear factors as opposed to fact.

“I weighed up the issues myself and I suppose just on balance I thought that leaving was the best option and in the end that is the way I did vote.”

He added: “What I did say prior to the vote was that whatever happened there would be lots of negotiations whether we stayed in or came out.”

Mr Elliott said he now feels that “in the longer term we can probably make a better go of it”.

“There was going to be uncertainty if we came out, and uncertainty if we remained in. How many countries were going to come into Europe in the next five to 10 years and how significant would that have been in the budget that goes into Europe?”