Theresa May must not trigger article 50 before these vital questions are answered

Carole Cadwalldr in The Guardian

Is Brexit the will of the people? And if so, which people exactly? There are many disquieting questions to be asked about world events right now. But, in the week in which Theresa May received parliament’s approval to trigger article 50 and send us crashing out of the European Union, there are none more compelling and urgent than about the integrity of our entire democratic system.

The questions that remain unanswered are not about party infighting, and not even about Brexit. The issue is this: did foreign individuals or powers, acting covertly, subvert our democracy?

There are mounting and deeply disquieting questions about the role “dark money” may have played during last year’s EU referendum; and about whether the use of offshore jurisdictions, loopholes in European and North American data laws, undeclared foreign donors, a closed, all-powerful technological system (Facebook) and an antiquated and hopelessly out-of-touch oversight body has undermined the very foundations of our electoral system. 

This is what we know: the Electoral Commission is still assessing claims that potentially illegal donations were made; the information commissioner is investigating “possible illegal” use of data; the heads of MI6 and GCHQ have both voiced unprecedented warnings about foreign interference in our democratic systems; the government has refused to elaborate on what these are; one of the leave campaigns has admitted the undeclared support and help of the American hedge fund billionaire who backed Trump; the Crown Prosecution Service is being asked to mount a criminal investigation; and questions have been raised about possible unlawful collaboration between different elements of the leave campaign.

And this all leads to the next question: are we really going to allow article 50 to be triggered when we don’t even know if the referendum was freely, fairly and legally conducted?

Even if you back Brexit, even if you can’t wait for Theresa May to pull the article 50 trigger, this should be the cause of serious concern. Yes, maybe this vote went the way you wanted. But what about the next?


MI6 and GCHQ have both voiced warnings about foreign interference in our democratic systems

This weekend brought two startling warnings from two entirely different quarters. The first from the man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, who said he was “extremely worried” about the future of democracy; that data harvesting was being used to “chilling” effect; that political targeting on the basis of it was “unethical”; and that the internet had been weaponised and was being used against us.

The second came from GCHQ, whose National Cyber Security Centre head has written to the main political parties warning of hostile interference. This was months after the head of the MI6, Alex Younger, made an unprecedented speech warning of “cyber attacks, propaganda or subversion of the democratic process”. And he added: “The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty. They should be a concern to all those who share democratic values.”

Three months on, May’s government has refused to tell us what those risks are. What does Younger know? Why has parliament not been told? Who is investigating, and when will we know the results? Where is Dominic Grieve, the head of the intelligence select committee, in all this? And how can any of us have any trust in the democratic process when vital information is being kept from us?

Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics



We do know that Russian interests interfered in the US election. That has been catalogued by the National Security Agency, the CIA and the FBI. And that the beneficiary of that interference was Donald Trump. We know that Trump, his campaign strategist Steve Bannon, and the billionaire who funded his campaign, Robert Mercer, all have long-standing, close ties to Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and last year’s Leave.eu campaign. We know that the data company Cambridge Analytica, owned by Mercer and with Steve Bannon on the board, undertook work for Leave.eu.

We know that Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, employed a Canadian individual – Zackary Massingham – to undertake work for it. We know Massingham is a director of a company called AggregateIQ, and that Vote Leave – the official leave campaign – paid AggregateIQ £3.5m to do its profiling and Facebook advertising. We know it paid AggregateIQ a further £725,000 on behalf of two other organisations – one of which was a 23-year-old student who worked in Vote Leave’s office. And we know Northern Ireland’s Democraticlse we know: that the law demands that coordinated campaigns declare their expenditure and are subject to a strict combined limit. Yet here we see four different campaigns using the same tiny Canadian company based thousands of miles and seven time zones away. Coincidence? And this same company, AggregateIQ, has direct links (through Massingham) to the company used by the separate campaign Leave.eu.

However, we don’t know what contact, if any, there was between these five campaigns, or if employing a North American company (in a jurisdiction known for its far less stringent laws on both data protection and financial disclosure) had other benefits. But we do know that data is power: Facebook admitted last week that it can use data to swing elections – for the right price.

All the individuals and organisations deny any wrongdoing. But there are too many questions. There may be straightforward explanations but they have to be asked, addressed and answered.

If May triggers article 50 before we have those answers, we won’t know if Brexit is the will of the people or if it’s the result of a determined foreign actor, or actors, undermining our entire democratic system.

We won't trigger Article 50 until after 2017 – and that means Brexit may never happen at all

Dennis MacShane in The Independent


It is now eight weeks since we voted to leave the EU but it may be at least eight years before the UK is fully and totally out of Europe– if we finally leave at all. After a post-truth Brexit campaign, now the era of truth is dawning in Downing Street and they are discovering there was never any work completed by the Brexit team on what the costs of leaving the EU would be and how precisely it would be done.

The new Prime Minister, Theresa May, who is coldly pragmatic, has given the three Musketeers of Brexit – Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis – the task of getting us out of Europe as painlessly and quickly as possible. They are finding out that their two decades of demagogic condemnation of the EU and all its works is no preparation at all for turning Brexit into reality. Instead, there is the surreal sight of Liam Fox writing a letter saying that half the Foreign Office staff and responsibilities should be placed under his control. Ever since it was set up after Britain lost America at the end of the 18th century, the Foreign Office has been seeing off raids on its territory like these.

Having been told that leaving the EU would reduce bureaucracy and costs, there is the bizarre sight of Whitehall recruiters hiring lawyers expert in EU law on £5,000 a day and consultants from KPMG and Ernst and Young on £1,000 a day. The extra cost of negotiating Brexit is reckoned to cost £5bn – which taxpayers will have to pay for.

Fox has a name for unforced errors, as his abrupt dismissal as Defence Secretary in 2011 showed. He is finding out from the US Trade Secretary, and every other minister responsible for trade around the world, that no-one will talk to the UK about trade deals until we are completely outside the EU.

For years the Europhobes told us that the world would be queuing up to sign trade deals with Britain once we were out of Europe. Now Fox is discovering that it is illegal under World Trade Organisation rules to start negotiations with the UK as the EU has sole and exclusive responsibility for speaking for its member states on major trade matters.

Of course countries can negotiate small market openings. Spain has spent eight years negotiating a deal to export plums to China. The UK has spent just as long trying to get India to lift its 150 per cent tariff on Scotch whisky – so far, without success. The Indians are willing to let Scotch be imported duty-free but in exchange they want visa-free access for Indians to come to the UK. Over to Dr Fox to solve that conundrum.

When she was Home Secretary, Theresa May tried to abolish visa-free travel arrangements with Brazil, but was slapped down by David Cameron who judged the good relations with Brazil was worth the risk of some over-staying by Brazilians who came to London and then disappeared into the black labour market. The same dilemma faces UK exporters who have been told by all EU leaders, not just the wicked Eurocrats, but nationally elected leaders in Germany and France that there is no question of having access to the EU Single Market for 500 million middle class consumers without allowing those consumers the right to travel, live and work – the same rights that more than a million Brits in Spain enjoy too.

No-one in Europe wants to ”punish” Britain but no EU leader dare deny his or her own citizens the rights that Brits take for granted in order to give the UK a special privileged status.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has sensibly said that there is no point in beginning the initial withdrawal negotiations – the so-called 'Article 50 procedure' – until there is clarity on who will be in charge of Europe. In 2017 there are elections in France likely to produce a new president next May and right-wing challengers have called for the relocation of the Calais frontier to UK territory. Angela Merkel will have done 12 years as German Chancellor at the time of the federal elections in September 2017 and may decide to stand down rather than go on and on and on to the kind of unhappy career end of Helmut Kohl.

But Khan, a shrewd EU watcher, is right to say that inserting a rushed UK withdrawal into a crucial election year in both France and Germany is not smart.

He also has to speak for London and the $120tn volume of business in trading and clearing euros, which only takes place in London because we are in the EU. London is home to 350,000 French citizens alone, as well as hundreds of thousands other European professionals, and removing their right to live and work freely in the UK will send a disastrous signal around the world that London is no longer Europe’s hub for financial transactions.

In any event, Article 50 negotiations are not even foreplay to the main event. They only cover how to share out between Brussels and London the responsibility for paying the pensions of Brits who work for the EU and will now be dismissed, as well as existing retirees like Stanley Johnson, father of Brexiteer Boris.

Once Article 50 talks are over, Jean-Claude Piris, the EU’s former chief lawyer, reckons it will take at least eight years to write out any kind of satisfactory UK-EU deal on trade access and the rights of British citizens living in Europe. Pascal Lamy, the former WTO director general, also dismisses the idea that a final EU-UK trade deal is achieveable without years of negotiation. It has taken the EU and Canada eight years to agree a relatively modest trade deal which now has to be ratified by all 28 EU national parliaments. Any UK-EU deal would also have to be agreed by national parliamentarians from Ireland to Bulgaria.

To be sure, the 23 June vote must be accepted and respected, even if two million young citizens and two million Brits in Europe were denied a vote by the inefficient jobsworths at the Electoral Commission. But it is not the last word. There has been a major new surge led by young activists who refuse to accept, as with general elections, that a change in UK policy is impossible.

Theresa May is the leader of Tory MPs and most of them – like her – were Eurosceptic but not in favour of the Ukip-Johnson-Fox agenda on Europe. She returns from her Alpine walking holiday to find that her predecessor, David Cameron, has handed her mission impossible: to pull the UK out of Europe without huge economic damage and political anger.

Farage, Johnson and Fox have won their 15 year-long battle to obtain a vote for Brexit. But Britain is not out of Europe. And as the UK public realises the damage to their future that isolation represents, there will be a re-think.

May is no Europhile, but she does not want to lead a Britain that become poorer and weaker in wealth and status, with the ever-present shadow of Scotland leaving the UK too. The Europhobes who brought us Brexit may not have the last laugh.

How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down

Geoffrey Robertson in The Guardian

It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.

It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.

Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.

It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.

Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated


Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.

Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.

In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership.

So how should MPs vote come November, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduces the 2016 European Communities Act (Repeal) Bill? Those from London and Scotland should happily vote against it, following their constituents’ wishes. So should Labour MPs – it’s their party policy after all.

By November, there may be other very good reasons for MPs to refuse to leave Europe. Brexit may turn out to be just too difficult. Staying in the EU may be the only way to stop Scotland from splitting, or to rescue the pound. A poll on Sunday tells us that a million leave voters are already regretting their choice: a significant public change of mind would amply justify a parliamentary refusal to Brexit. It may be, in November, that President Donald Trump becomes the leader of the free world – in which case a strong EU would become more necessary than ever. Or it may simply be that a majority of MPs, mindful of their constitutional duty to do what is best for Britain, conscientiously decide that it is best to remain.

There is no point in holding another referendum (as several million online petitioners are urging). Referendums are alien to our traditions, they are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy. The only way forward now depends on the courage, intelligence and conscience of your local MP. So have your say in the traditional way: lobby him or her to vote against the government when it tries to Brexit, because parliament is sovereign.

W ill article 50 ever be triggered?

Jon Henley in The Guardian




 

When David Cameron delivered his resignation speech outside No 10 on Friday, he said he would leave the task of triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty – the untested procedure governing how an EU member state leaves the bloc – to his successor.

This has prompted much speculation – and a glimmer of hope for those who want Britain to remain in the European Union. Cameron, they argue, had repeatedly said during the campaign that article 50 would be triggered immediately if Vote Leave were to win the Brexit referendum.

By not doing so, the theory is, and by bequeathing the responsibility to whoever succeeds him, Cameron has handed the next prime minister a poisoned chalice. Given the dramatic reaction to Brexit – on world stock markets, on the foreign exchanges, in Scotland, across Europe – and with the enormity of the consequences of leaving the EU now plain, who will dare pull the trigger?

One consequence of this, as a below-the-line commenter argued on the Guardian website, is that Cameron has effectively snookered the Brexit camp: they may have won the referendum, but they cannot use the mandate they have been given because if they do so they will be seen to be knowingly condemning the UK to recession, breakup and years of pain.

This could mean, as lawyer and writer David Allen Green has suggested in a blogpost, that “the longer article 50 notification is put off, the greater the chance it will never be made ... As long as the notification is not sent, the UK remains part of the EU. And there is currently no reason or evidence to believe that, regardless of the referendum result, the notification will be sent at all.”

Is this feasible? Certainly, leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson and Matthew Elliott, who ran Vote Leave, have said very clearly they are in no hurry to push the button.

They argue it is far more sensible to hold informal talks with Brussels, and other member states, in order to arrive at the outline of a possible settlement before locking Britain into the strict two-year timeframe within which article 50 negotiations must be concluded (and if they are not, Britain risks having to leave the EU with no deal at all).

In Brussels and other EU capitals, the UK’s heel-dragging is already causing great frustration. European foreign ministers and EU leaders have lined up this weekend to impress on Britain the need for urgency. Brexit talks must begin “immediately”, they said, so as to avoid a sustained period of uncertainty and instability that, with Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, could do great damage to the already weakened bloc.


© Reuters 

Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, expects Cameron to formally announce Britain’s EU exit on Tuesday evening.But there seems to be no immediate legal means out of the stalemate. It is entirely up to the departing member state to trigger article 50, by issuing formal notification of intention to leave: no one, in Brussels, Berlin or Paris, can force it to. But equally, there is nothing in article 50 that obliges the EU to open talks – including the informal talks the Brexit leaders want – before formal notification has been made.

“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University. “Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”

The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, has said he expects Cameron to initiate the process on Tuesday evening, making the formal announcement that Britain intends to exit the EU at the summit dinner he is due to address before going home and leaving – for the first time – the other 27 member states to discuss Britain’s situation without him the following day.

The European council has confirmed that notification does not have to be in writing, but could be in the form of a formal statement to the summit – so Cameron had better be careful about what exactly he says.


© PA 10 highest votes for LeaveBut reports in German newspaper 

Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others, that an increasingly frustrated EU could, if push comes to shove, decide to consider the referendum result itself as “an official wish to leave” seem unreliable. “The notification of article 50 is a formal act and has to be done by the British government to the European council,” an EU official told Reuters.

“It has to be done in an unequivocal manner, with the explicit intent to trigger article 50. Negotiations to leave and on the future relationship can only begin after such a formal notification. If it is indeed the intention of the British government to leave the EU, it is therefore in its interest to notify as soon as possible.”

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, has said “de facto ejection” is a possibility unless Britain gets a move on, but it is unclear on what grounds that could happen. Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty allows the EU to suspend a member if it deems it to be in breach of basic principles of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law. But that would be the nuclear option.

The situation could get quite nasty, quite quickly. Politically, the pressure on Cameron – and on his successor, whoever that may be – could be extreme. But legally, there does not appear to be any easy way out. If Britain so chooses, this could become a standoff that could drag on for years.

The EU will treat Britain like Greece

Matthew Holehouse The Telegraph

I arrived in Brussels as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in early June, 2015. A fortnight later, Alexis Tsipras snubbed Brussels, and called a referendum on the third bailout that was designed to save the Eurozone from collapse.

The terms he was later given - €50bn of assets sold and a de facto control of economic policy surrendered - were so harsh they were later denounced as a "coup".

It taught me two things: that in the cause of its salvation the European Union can be profoundly flexible and exceptionally brutal, and that events can swiftly take a momentum that is hard to control.

Nothing of that experience gives me hope for the years that now await our country.

Britain is almost certainly out the European Union

As far as Brussels is concerned, Britain has left.

At home on Friday morning, Britons were dumbstruck, agog at the result, or chuffed at having taught Brussels a lesson.

We now see street protests to overturn the result, internet petitions, suggestions that the UK or Scottish Parliament could revoke it or somehow make it go away. Westminster is occupied by Labour coups and Tory successions. Few seem to believe we are going.

In Brussels, they have been ready to say goodbye for a long time. Britain had been half-way out the door for forty years. David Cameron had announced this referendum in January 2013. He had won an election on the back of it, and many expected him to lose it. He, and they, repeated many times that it was final and binding. Patience is exhausted.

On Friday there was grave sadness, but no panic. The timetable for the talks was announced days before the vote. Martin Schulz, the president of the Parliament, spoke at dawn; Donald Tusk, the president of the Council, delivered a statement at 07.40 GMT. The founding members' foreign ministers met on Saturday; sherpas for the 27 remaining states will meet today to sketch out the months ahead.

Leaders have demanded Article 50 is activated immediately, to create certainty. Realistically, Mr Cameron has until Christmas.

Scotland is ready to quit, and diplomats are quite open to welcoming them into the EU club.

The treaties say that all Britain’s rights and obligations must remain for two years once Article 50 is activated. But Lord Hill, Britain’s commissioner, quit yesterday, and Downing Street said it had no plans to replace him, and Jean-Claude Juncker told Ukip MEPs to pack their bags. Is the legal order fragmenting? What other clauses in the treaties - which protect British expats on the continent, among other things - will now be ignored without consequence?

Can it be halted?

The European Council has offered a narrow window, saying that Britain has not left until Article 50 is activated formally by the Prime Minister, “if it is indeed the intention of the British government.”

Mr Cameron has left it to his successor to activate it. Mrs Merkel is in no hurry. Senior EU sources say they can wait until Christmas, but prevarication would trash Britain's credit-worthiness.

There are two problems. Firstly, to not activate Article 50 would be a rejection of democracy on a scale that could only be described as a coup, and would poison British public life for generations.

Secondly, a wave of movements demanding referendums on the terms of membership, given a huge boost by Mr Cameron, is tearing across Europe – in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary. Marine Le Pen could well run rampant in French elections in the spring.

Leaders anticipated that Boris Johnson would pursue a 'vote leave for a better deal' strategy, and ruled it out from February, precisely to prevent this scenario.

Jean-Claude Juncker said on Friday: “The repercussions of the British referendum could quickly put a stop to such crass rabble-rousing, as it should soon become clear that the UK was better off inside the EU.” Britain simply has to go, on bad terms, pour encourager les autres.

Britain has very few friends

In European eyes, David Cameron has had a remarkably generous lot: already out the euro, ever closer union, justice and home affairs obligations and Schengen, he was offered an enhanced deal that confirmed the perks of membership with scant obligations.

Yet he attacked Brussels for years for domestic advantage. Mr Cameron campaigned hard against his appointment. Stories about Mr Juncker's alleged drinking and the war record of his father, a conscript in the Wehrmacht, emerged. Yet Juncker offered an olive branch by giving Jonathan Hill the financial services portfolio Mr Cameron craved, in order to preserve the City. He is profoundly angry.

In his brutal negotiation, Alexis Tsipras had a number of cards to play. There was the “solidarity” that EU states are obliged to show each other, the pity and guilt at the plight of the Greek people who had been punished through no fault of their own, and the €83 billion of German taxpayer cash in Greek banks that risked going up in smoke. Their referendum had been hasty, the question unclear, Mr Juncker said; Greeks made plain they wanted to remain Europeans.

No such goodwill exists for Britain, now an ex-member. Mr Johnson, the possible next prime minister, caused genuine and grave offence by likening the European project to the ambitions of Hitler. His declarations that Brexit will trigger events that unravel the entire project is, in effect, a declaration of war that must be met.

Recall how inflexible European leaders were during Mr Cameron’s attempted renegotiation, when he put a gun to their heads and threatened to leave unless they submitted to his demands. He has fired that gun in the air, and locked himself out the room. Britain’s only leverage is how much damage a messy Brexit would inflict on European economies.


Time is not on our side

Once Article 50 is activated, events will move frighteningly fast. It took Mr Cameron seven full months to secure his meagre renegotiation. He will have just two years to get an exit deal covering every facet of British life, and a trade deal that will do the least harm to the fragile, debt-laden economy.

The government is in disarray, the Labour party in meltdown, and the imminent exit of Scotland means it will be unclear with who or what, exactly, the EU is negotiating with. The French foreign minister yesterday implored Cameron to find a successor to take charge.

A ban issued from Downing Street on Brexit preparations – lest it boost the leave campaign – meant Britain’s most senior officials were permitted to “think” about a Brexit, but not allowed to write anything down.

Several take their guide from Flexcit, a book by a blogger Richard North that advocates a Norway-style deal as a half-way house under a “soft” exit. The crucial weeks ahead of polling day were spent in purdah, tending the garden.

The UK has next to no trade negotiators, and will need hundreds, to replicate the market access it currently has with 50 states around the world .

But the EU is ready. Talks in Jean-Claude Juncker’s in house think-tank began months ago. Foreign ministries have been preparing position papers. Lawyers are busy: Brussels has had 70 years of practice in writing treaties, signing trade talks, fixing accessions and bailouts, making and breaking nations.

We don't get to be Norway

The Leavers’ best hope – a Norway deal that means EEA status, retained rights for the City and immigration - is almost certainly off the table.

Britain has made clear it doesn’t want free movement – and so any deal on those grounds would be so impossibly fragile as to be a waste of time. Frankfurt and Paris would certainly like our banks. Mr Juncker is determined to undo Britain's attempt to create a multi-currency union, meaning clearing houses that trade in Euros and generate billions for the Exchequer will have to be domiciled in the Eurozone.

Leaders have made clear, before and after the vote, that Britain is not getting access to the single market.

“Out is out,” said Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German finance minister, some weeks ago.

“There will certainly be no cherry picking,” confirmed Mr Juncker, saying it will be a "clean" divorce.

More likely is a Canadian-style trade deal, that will set tariffs on imports and exports. That may be fine for German manufacturers. But Britain’s service economy will be cut up like an old car. British graduates are about to learn what it's like to use an Australian-style points system.

We do not control this process

Article 50 is designed so that it leaves any state that activates it is a supplicant.

The remaining EU states will negotiate between themselves and deal with the UK as one, just as they would for Albania or Turkey.

If a deal covering trade arrangements isn’t struck once the two-year period expires, Britain is simply released from the EU treaties and left on crippling WTO terms - something the Treasury terms a "severe shock scenario" and which it envisages would likely result in a cut in GDP of six per cent and increase unemployment by 800,000, not including the risks presented by emergency spending cuts, or the "tipping points" presented by the crystallisation of financial stability risks.

It means the government will effectively be forced to take any fait accompli presented at the last minute, or face ruin.

Even then, any further trade deal will require ratification by EU parliaments, meaning Belgian MPs, amongst others, can veto it.

The Leave campaign is fond of a quote attributed to Churchill: “Each time we have to choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.”

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea.