difficult. If I disagree slightly with Andrea, it's that I'm afraid that history shows with

treaty making that building a treaty may be long, but because it tends to involve goodwill

and a desire to make progress towards a goal, it's probably rather easier than dismantling parts

of the treaty, which I'm afraid is what we are attempting to do.

And we're doing it because there are aspects of our treaty obligations to the EU, which in the referendum it was made clear people don't want.

The difficulty any sensible government has is that because it has a

responsibility to try to look after the well-being of its citizens, it tends unless it's a Stalinist

government or its king John Poon to be wary of taking risk. It wants to minimize risk because risk causes

disruption and disruption brings with it unpredictable consequences which you can't necessarily

factor through. And while certainly totally impossible to say whether we'll be better off in or out

in 30 years' time, I think we can all agree, I suspect, that the short to medium term

disentanglement carries with its substantial risks because there will be rapid change as the United Kingdom adjust to it. Just to give one

example, the British Banking Association explained to me that their own reckoning is at the

moment the UK does 70% of the banking funding of all EU business bank lending.

It's a very high figure.

Their estimate is that post-Brexit that will reduce to around 40% at most.

Now, that may not matter.

I mean, if the economy is expanding in other areas and in actually banking is expanding

generally across Europe,

it may actually be that the UK banks will be very happily off in 15 years time. I don't know,

but it is a sudden and profound shift. And that is really the reason why at the moment I feel we are to an extent for all, and I must

stress this, the good intentions set out in both the Lancaster House speech and the Florence

...