Peter Binns, of Ebrington Street, Kingsbridge, writes:

What would happen if we were to leave the EU?

Well, imagine you are President Hollande of France, looking over your shoulder at Marine le Pen and the far-right National Front, who support France leaving the EU. Recent polls have le Pen way in front of Hollande as we run up to France’s 2017 presidential election.

The last thing you want is to show that leaving the EU can really work. So what do you do? What do you have to do?

You have to make sure that Brexit is a failure, with the most punitive outcome for post-Brexit UK, as a dire warning to le Pen’s followers. And it’s easy to do because Hollande – like all the other 26 EU leaders – has an absolute veto on post-Brexit arrangements. It may hurt France economically, but politics always trumps economics, especially with an election round the corner and you already look like the also-ran.

What’s true for France is true also for Europe’s other incumbent leaders threatened by far-right anti-EU parties, such as the Dutch Freedom Party.

None of them can afford to do anything else. So forget the amicable arrangements made with non-EU countries Norway, Switzer­land, Canada in the past and which Brexiteers fondly imagine can be repeated; it will be hard ball from now on.

And that’s not all. As pointed out in last week, Scotland would then likely want out of UK.

And what about poor old Northern Ireland? If people vote ‘leave’ so as to control immigration, that would mean a 300-mile ‘hard’ border with the Irish Republic – potentially economically disastrous for both countries, and one of the factors that, along with Scot­land’s exit, could lead to the break-up of the UK.

Is that what we really want?