Reply to post:

You have a sadly limited imagination, I fear.

I have a very good imagination. I can imagine lots of things. Sadly, imagining, no matter how hard you try, doesn't make things real. Because of this, I tend to rely on facts, rather than magical thinking.

The facts here, being that in the EU, we have a whole set of benefits which we will cease to have when we leave. We could do various deals with our closest neighbours to replace those benefits, but because they would be able to dictate the terms, the replacement benefits would be at an inherently higher cost. The EU have repeatedly said (and it makes perfect common sense) that any deals with the UK would not be on more favourable terms to us than the equivalent arrangements between member states. The days of gunship diplomacy where we might try to sway their opinions through what might be euphemistically termed a side-channel negotiaion, are long gone. We are a small country of ~65M people trying to strong-arm the world's largest trading bloc of 500M (plus some other countries who are i the common market / customs union but not the EU, like Norway)

So, in short, the economic / trading benefits are moot. We also lose the benefit of regulatory harmonisation for things ike medicine, electronics, food safety, etc. All those useful things that people harp on about being "the EU telling us what to do" but actually make everyone's life easier. We could replicate those things here (at the cost of duplicating all the agencies involved, rather than splitting the cost 28 ways). That's hardly going to free up £350M a week, because, oddly, that money (although it is in fact about 40% less than that) actually pays for things that we need, and use, as well as being able to, through economies of scale, have some left over to help the less well off in Europe. Like the Welsh, and the North-East. (8 out of the 10 areas in Northern Europe that receive/received EU aid are in the UK)

So, go ahead, if imagination is so great when it comes to making things work, tell me what your imaginary benefits are, and how they can be achieved by tunring that imagination into actual reality? Aspirational waffle aside, I'd love to hear some cold, hard, plans for what we're getting instead.