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Michael Gove, a senior government minister who favored Brexit, exploited this sentiment, declaring during the campaign that "people in this country have had enough of experts," pitting the economists who predicted Brexit would be bad for Britain against everyday people. This ploy enraged experts like the particle physicist Brian Cox, who said in response: "It's the road back to the cave. Being an expert does not mean that you are someone with a vested interest in something; it means you spend your life studying something. You're not necessarily right--but you're more likely to be right than someone who's not spent their life studying it."

Supporters of the EU can hardly be blamed, in the circumstances, for making change-aversion their key argument. They don't want to get drawn into arguments about democracy, or sovereignty, or the EU's declining share of the world economy, or border control, or Britain's budget contributions. They'd much rather conjure unspecific, inchoate fears about change.

Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn't reject the liberal package in its entirety - they lost faith mainly in its globalising part.

Taxation is the easiest to quantify. According to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), Britain's contribution to the EU in 2016 will be PS19.6 billion gross or PS11.1 billion net.1 Since we are measuring the impact on taxation, it is the gross figure that is relevant here. Sure, some of the money Britain hands over to the EU is returned or spent in this country. But, when measuring tax, we don't deduct notional value. Ask your neighbours how much their council tax bill is. I doubt they'll subtract the value of the bin collection and the street lighting. So what does PS19.6 billion amount to? According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), it is equivalent to the combined revenue of Vehicle Excise (PS5.9 billion), Capital Gains Tax (PS5.4 billion), Air Passenger Duty (PS3.2 billion), Inheritance Tax (PS3.9 billion) and Petroleum Tax (PS1.2 billion). To put it another way, it would allow the entire country to get a 71 per cent rebate in council tax (which raises PS27.6 billion).

According to HMRC, Britain bought from the other twenty-seven EU members more than she sold to them to the value of PS59 billion in 2014. On leaving, the UK would instantly become the EU's single largest export destination, worth PS289 billion. It is very rare, in any negotiation, for the salesman to bully or threaten the customer.

The EU question comes down, in the end, to legal supremacy. Who, ultimately, runs Britain? Can we make our own laws, or must we recognize EU primacy? Are we an independent country, co-operating with our neighbours, or a sub-unit within a larger European polity?

Fully 79 per cent of business activity in the United Kingdom is in this category: wholly internal. Most firms, indeed, trade only within a ten-mile radius of where they are sited. Of the 21 per cent of our GDP that depends on overseas commerce, 10 per cent is accounted for by trade with the EU, and 11 per cent by trade with the rest of the world.

Now here's the clinching statistic. The EU takes 55 per cent of Swiss exports, and 81 per cent of Norwegian exports, as opposed to 45 per cent of British exports. As we have seen, Europhiles like to claim that 'around' half our exports go to the EU, but that figure has fallen by 10 per cent since 2006. How much lower must it go before we drop the idea that we need to merge our political institutions?

You see how the system works? The EU sets up and funds an interest group. That group duly demands that Eurocrats seize more powers. Eurocrats then announce that, in response to popular demand, they are extending their jurisdiction.

When people ask 'Leave' campaigners to set out their alternative in detail, they are inviting us to behave as if we were in office. But we're not. It'll be for the United Kingdom's elected representatives to set the precise terms and conditions of our future relations with the EU. All we can do is set out some broad, obvious guidelines: we'd retain free trade with the single market; we'd withdraw from the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies; our laws would be supreme on our own territory; we'd apply no tariffs, either to EU or non-EU states; we'd remain outside Schengen; we'd stay in NATO and the Council of Europe.

Of all the twenty-eight EU states, Britain is by far the hardest hit by the Common Commercial Policy. Twenty-six of the other twenty-seven members sell the majority of their exports to the rest of the EU. Britain and Greece are the only two EU nations that trade more overseas than in Europe and, in Britain's case, the gap is starting to widen seriously.

because, as I have tried to show in this chapter, the world, too, is changing. The assumption that underpinned the UK's accession in the 1970s has been falsified: instead of joining a vibrant and growing free trade area, we have shackled ourselves to the only trade bloc on the planet that is experiencing no significant growth.

the Brexit debate in Britain - a major nuclear power - revolved mainly around questions of economics and immigration, while the vital contribution of the EU to European and global peace has largely been ignored. After centuries of terrible bloodshed, French, Germans, Italians and Britons have finally built a mechanism that ensures continental harmony - only to have the British public throw a spanner into the miracle machine.