Hi everyone and welcome to this latest edition of our Brexit and Beyond podcast,

and I'm absolutely delighted this week to welcome from what is I I hear, a snowy Athens, Professor Lucas

Sarkalis from the University of Athens, Eliamet Think Tank, formerly of the London School of

Economics and Oxford University. At Oxford University, I believe, Lucas, you had some

fantastically talented students. Absolutely. I can see one of them just right now. What a great start. I want to go back,

if I can, to your book, in Defense of Europe, which was published, I think, a week before the 2016

referendum. And I think it's fair to say, you didn't anticipate how that that referendum would go or what the campaign itself would look like.

What have you learnt about Britain from the experience of the referendum and its aftermath?

Well, to be honest, I had been calling for a referendum in the UK for some time before it actually took place, because I realized

that Britain was on a very dangerous path in relation to the European Union. It almost looked

like an accident waiting to happen. The big turning point was economic and monetary union, because the adoption of the Europe

was a turning point, because Britain at that time decided it was a big step too far for

it to take, and it couldn't stop the rest of Europe taking it.

So it felt increasingly marginalized, isolated inside the European

Union. So I felt that the proper debate was due and such a debate could be created by a referendum.

I was wrong in the sense that I probably underestimated the risk of demagogues taking over

and the debate being hijacked by all sorts of other issues rather than having proper discussion

about the pros and cons of being a member of the European Union. Although I wonder whether, again, if I may use the

phrase I used before, whether it was an accident waiting to happen. Britain was getting increasingly

isolated inside the European Union. And you felt that. I mean, I remember taking part in meetings in Brussels,

talk of the record, high-level advisors, politicians, and so on. And in years before 2016,

very often there was no British participant in them. Such a thing would have been totally

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