The UK has gone into these Brexit negotiations with a lot of naivety, a complete loss of sense of reality, sheer ignorance and massive delusions of grandeur.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Irrespective of the question whether this notion of a federal Europe was a good idea in the first place, given that genetically we humans are still tribal people –?anyone familiar with Dunbar’s number of 150? – and irrespective of the question whether it was a good idea for the UK to join this club, the stark reality remains that this country has been a member for over four decades.

Now it wants to get out because half of the population, charmed by the siren songs of some political pied pipers and snake-oil vendors – and after a spurious referendum has decided so.

The leavers keep claiming that the UK has never wanted a politically closer Europe but has only been interested in a trading relationship. That is utter nonsense.

From the very beginning it was clear that the ultimate goal was a political union of some sort.

The political class, including Margaret Thatcher –?although she claimed she had been duped – has always known this. This idea has not always been communicated very clearly to the electorate so as to avoid complicated discussions with the uninitiated.

Back in 1947, a certain Edwin Duncan Sandys (Baron Duncan-Sandys), notable British politician, together with the French set up the United European Movement, which merged in 1948 with the much larger European Movement International, in which Duncan-Sandys father-in-law, a certain Winston Churchill, played a pivotal role.

The tenets of this movements – total European integration – became established in the charter of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the very founding organisation of the EU as we know it today.

Liam Fox claimed the withdrawal negotiations would be one of the easiest in human history.

The sub-text here is that the UK is a world power after all and will tell the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels how to go about the separation.

Brussels glibly took up the challenge, offering full co-operation should the UK come up with something better than the four freedoms of movement plus the overall jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, the corner-stones of the EU’s position.

This offer is a poisened chalice as anything better in the EU’s view – and only this view counts – would just be something even more federalistic.

Now the leavers bemoan the “theological, dogmatic, impenetrable intransigence” of the EU and its unwillingness to be open to the UK’s “innovative and creative ideas”­, which are nothing but cherry-picking.

Even if the EU wanted to make concessions to the UK, which it doesn’t, it simply couldn’t as this would open the floodgates. Other wavering member states would rightly demand the same concessions. Therefore, being fed-up with the shenanigans of the UK, the arch-federalists in the EU, led by the dominant Franco-German axis, have closed ranks and are determined to hang the UK out to dry if it doesn’t play ball.

I frequently read that after Brexit the UK will be free to make trading arrangements with other countries. Really? With whom? The so-called Commonwealth of Nations?

These countries won’t beat a path to the door of the UK, their old colonial master.

Canada is bound to the EU by CETA. Australia and New Zealand are orientated towards the Pacific Rim. Indian sub-continent? Don’t be silly. Other countries? Japan? Trading arrangement with the EU in place. China is only interested in trading with the entire block and not with single countries. Some months ago Angela Merkel toured Latin America, speaking to the MERCOSUR countries and Mexico, reminding them strongly on which side their bread is buttered.

None of all these countries mentioned will risk their relationship with the vast EU-bloc just to do the lone UK a favour.

Personally, I have no idea what will become of the EU in the long term. It will continue to exist in some form, possibly in a two-tier system. But for now and for some time to come it will present itself as the very federalistic United States of Europe and thus won’t let the UK off the hook.

Finally, had the Remainers fought a better pre-referendum campaign, more psychologically switched on, we wouldn’t be in this mess, as the pendulum would have swung the other way and most likely with a higher margin than a pathetic 1.89 per cent.

Herbert Holzinger

Quinta Close, Torquay