The 145 nations include the US, China and Japan, and Canada and Australia. Is the US in geopolitical outer darkness? Are China and Japan struggling to escape from a tenebrous abyss? Have Canada and Australia been hurled into “economic outer space”? All Brexit advocates are proposing is that the UK ceases to be a member of the EU and takes a position among the nations of the world similar to that of the 164 present non-EU states. That is all. Indeed, in many respects the UK might be like a larger version of Australia or Canada. It could have — and in practice almost definitely would have — much the same political and legal institutions, and the same ability to defend its interests in international forums, that these English-speaking nations have. The Cameron & Co rhetoric of loneliness and detachment, and of descent into gloom, is ludicrous.

Canada has set Britain an example. When the UK joined the then Common Market in 1973, widespread popular support was based on economics, that the UK would enjoy free trade in industrial products with its neighbours. Canada and the EU have now signed a free-trade agreement that does not envisage Canada, at any stage, being forced to participate in the EU’s “ever-closer” political union. If Canada can do that, so can Britain. No doubt Cameron & Co will warn that, by leaving the EU, Britain runs the risk of a long period of uncertainty while its new status is being defined. As it happens, the negotiations over the EU-Canada trade agreement lasted eight years, but people continued to go to work, goods and services kept on being produced, exports and imports passed through ports, and day-to-day economic reality was undisturbed. No impact from extra uncertainty can be identified in the macroeconomic data. There may be valid arguments against Brexit, but the leap-in-the-dark claim is not one of them.