Its seems professor Dougan, professor of EU law at liverpool university, has again been answering questions about the implications of Brexit.
He mentions what he considerd was the dishonesty of the leave campaign. In particular because most of Leave's arguments were legalistic and about questions of law, they can be straightforwardly addressed by examining the law. The EU commission does not create any EU law, they may suggest it but it is adopted by the elected parliament and council of ministers. 60% of EU law is not derived from the EU. The EU is not planning to create an army, and could not without UK permission and a referendum in the Uk. Turkey could not join the EU without UK permission. TTIP (latest trade scheme) currently being negotiated by countries all over the world could not be adopted without Uk permission and also consent of theEU parliament. In general the campaign wholly misrepresented the question of who has authority over the UK.
We do not pay the EU £350mn a week , so it could not possibly be spent on other things. after the campaign leave stated that leaving the EU would not lead to any reduction in immigration to the UK. There is no vienna convention protecting rights of Uk citizens living or working abroad currently. Whether they are allowed to continue will be entirely at the whim of their host countries, and similarly EU citizens here. Cameron's deal with the EU contained important binding legal agreements to create a veto for national parliaments and formally cement the separation of the single market and currency, so in future we would need only belong to the market.
The Uk government generated a report on the options should we leave the EU before the referendum. This is robust and legally sound, though may underplay the difficulties. leave sought to rubbish the reputations of anyone professional who commented on the referendum, including alleging Dougan was paid by the EU. he is not in any way.
The leave campaign illustrated the benefits of telling very big lies, because it is harder for people to catch you out. People do not believe that people would lie on such a huge scale, and so tend to belive at least some of it is true. It is to be expected that this will undermine further trust in politicians, and will lead to voters in the future coming to believe they were misled into voting Leave.
So what should we do about these lies? Leave have washed their hands of the decision, and said it is not their place to make a plan for the future but the government must get on with it. The referendum is not legally binding, so it is the government and parliaments decision what to do about the decision and the nature of the campaign. There is one view that having gone through the process, the result should be respected. But there is another that parliament has a duty to recognise that the leave campaign lied and voters are likely to change their vote, or to have already done so. Farage has already stated that he would not have accepted the result had it been the reverse.
The EU has stated it wants action soon. The Uk government does not have the resources to negotiate everything which would have to be negotiated quickly to smoothly implement leaving, and even if it did other parties would require years of negotiation which they will not hurry for the benefit of the UK. The Chinese have suggested iit would take 500 officials ten years. The loss of EU agreements will cause a loss of EU influence and power throughout the world.
Parliament is entitled to reject the referendum, but should set out clearly its reasons and validate this by a referendum or election.
