I don't think the leavers actually voted for opting out of any scientific cooperation or for damaging the economy, DMcG.

Nor do I. But there are those who will claim that, even though the precise consequences were not known, the risks were known and were included as part of their decision.

If you wanted my entirely speculative guess on what most leavers voted for, it was for everything to carry on exactly as it was, but with the additional rights to make new trade deals, to change any laws we wanted without referring to anyone else, including immigration and to pay less to the EU.   In the line of a song that I knew as a child but is so often apposite "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die."


Our private Galileo will cost £92million just to work out what to do, and then we can expect to overall costs to be a big multiple of the 1.4 billion euro which was our share of the project if we end up having to build a new one.