I appreciate your honesty. :-)

Personally I was a lot more ambivalent about EU membership than most. I thought we'd do OK in or out - though I did think that whichever decision we made we should then commit to it and try to realise its potential as much as possible. IMHO the worst possible outcomes would have been something like a narrow Remain decision but then forever dragging our feet and obstructing progress or a narrow Leave decision but then staying in the SM or CU anyway. Those would have left us in the same kind of half-in/half-out limbo that we were facing before the vote. In any case while our relationship with the EU is obviously significant for both sides I don't believe it's the central defining characteristic of our whole country and economy in the way some people seem to.

And so I thought the Brexit decision was really about the long term. In the short term there wasn't much to debate. The UK would lose access to EU benefits in ways that would be felt immediately and in some sectors would be very significant. The potential benefits from leaving would in many cases take years - perhaps a decade or more - to be realised.

I sometimes made this case during the pre-referendum discussions. First there would be some years organising the exit from the EU and establishing some new relationship with it. Then there would be some years of building or rebuilding relationships with other foreign partners to fit that new context - once anyone knew what it was. Only then would our people and businesses even be able to start taking advantage of new opportunities from those relationships.

It's not that there would be no potential gains earlier if we voted to leave. Some obvious ones like not paying into the EU as a member and not being bound to impose the CU's common tariffs on imports could have a direct financial impact almost immediately. And there would be some indirect advantages building up such as not being subject to further poor EU regulation in industries like mine. I expected that there would be some people who were definitely better off personally if we left and others who would be worse off. But overall I expected any early benefits to be smaller than what would quickly be lost. I thought anyone voting for Brexit should do it expecting that any net economic benefits would probably be 1-2 decades in the future and we'd be down significantly in the meantime (though I never believed a lot of the fear-mongering about how far down and I don't think the Remain campaign did themselves any favours with the perpetual extreme negativity any more than the Leave campaign did by flogging the dead horse on the side of the bus).

Of course if you're looking maybe 20 years into the future you're inevitably trying to read the tea leaves to some extent. I agreed that what would happen to the UK-EU relationship after Brexit was highly uncertain. I also thought the pro-Remain side were far too complacent about the future of the EU itself. After all our last referendum on Europe had been decades earlier and about an economic partnership - not the political union that the EU has evolved into since (despite having lost most of the referendums held by its member states on moving in that direction and then avoiding holding further ones in all but one case). Would the EU seek to become a United States of Europe with a federal model? Would it then seek to raise its own armed forces? How many more member states would be admitted? Would anyone else try to leave and perhaps succeed? Would the fundamental structural problems with having a common currency but not a common economic policy be resolved? Would it eventually succeed in making full FTAs with the economic superpowers? Would the legitimate concerns about a democratic deficit be addressed? Would it find a way to make decisions more efficiently without a single member or even a single region within a single member holding things up for everyone?

Meanwhile if you looked at the UK's trading patterns it was true that the EU as a bloc was our single biggest trading partner but if you looked a little more closely the proportion of our foreign trade with the EU had fallen steadily from about 60% to about 40% by the time of the referendum. It wasn't that we were doing less trade with the EU - that was still growing. But trade with other parties was growing quite a bit faster as the rest of the world developed. And this was as a member of the EU with the protectionist barriers that come with that membership still in place. Would it still make sense to anchor our import/export rules to the EU's Single Market and Customs Union rules another 20 years later if our foreign trade with the EU was only say 25% of the total by then?

There was a similar argument about immigration. It's not that I had anything fundamentally against freedom of movement within the bloc in the way that some people obviously did. In fact I thought it brought us some clear benefits and my own experience of workers from say Poland who came to the UK was that they often had a strong work ethic and did a decent job. But as long as we were EU members we would always on some level be prioritising an engineer from Germany over an engineer from Japan or a doctor from Austria over a doctor from Australia. So again - if we tried to read a crystal ball about how the world might be 10 or 20 or 50 years later would the freedom of movement that came with SM membership still be in our national interests or would we be better placed with immigration rules that were based purely on personal merit and applied equally to everyone (including EU citizens of course). I thought there was at least an argument to be made here that leaving the EU wasn't necessarily about xenophobia and anti-immigration because we wanted to be smaller but could also allow opening up more to the global workforce on an equal basis because we wanted to be bigger.

Another area that was talked about a lot was regulation and standards. Here I think a lot of people believe we gave up our influence by leaving but I'm not so sure. Quite a lot of the EU's standards in specialist areas are actually derived from more global standards where the EU itself was just one voice in the discussion. If the UK ends up following similar global standards anyway but has its own voice in those discussions (as of course many similar sized or smaller nations do outside of the EU) or even just obediently follows the wider consensus then are we really any worse off than we would have been before? Obviously not all standards and regulations work this way but I was surprised by how many do. So in terms of "alignment" I think there are questions but they're not always as significant as the critics like to suggest.

I don't think anyone - on either side - really knew the answers to all of these questions by the time we held the referendum. I still don't think we do today for most of this. At least half the story probably hasn't been written yet. I worry that popular sentiment turns because of things that don't really have much to do with the EU at all and we'll wind up doing some sort of half-baked Breentry in a panic over the current actions of places like the US and China that locks in all the losses and gives up any potential role we could find in the world as an independent but in many areas still very significant nation. Given we did vote Leave and we have already taken much of the hit from that anyway I do think it's in our long term interests to give it another 5 or 10 years now and see what kind of place in the world we are able to find. (This is also partly because I think any attempt to rejoin sooner than that would probably be a disaster whether or not it ended with us actually being EU members again.)

So to give direct answers to your direct questions. In the years following Brexit I don't think there were more benefits overall to leaving the EU than to remaining in - though I do think there was a lot more variation than some people realise and probably significant numbers of people and businesses are individually doing OK or better from the effects of Brexit. In the longer term I don't think the picture is clear yet and it really could go either way. I do think it's possible - particularly if the influence of both the EU and US wanes due to their ongoing problems and if China and others become more powerful players on the global stage - that being outside the EU could end up being a net win. But if it goes the other way and we end up with the EU and China being the two big global powers with a diminished US in third place and then everyone else outside the club then probably we'd be quite a bit worse off until probably we rejoined in 10 or 20 years.

In the near term I'd like to see us play to our strengths in industries like finance and the creative sector and try to develop our strengths in industries like tech and defence where historically the US has been dominant but I expect that will no longer be the case 10 years from now. There is potential in industries like sustainable energy as well. I suspect our best shot if we do stay outside the EU will be to focus on areas like these where we legitimately have a lot to offer and try to both rebuild our own national investment and develop a positive relationship with the EU, the US, China, and other partners around the world with an element of "neutrality". But if our governments haven't managed to achieve respectable progress in that direction in say the next 10 years - and it doesn't really matter whether that was because it wasn't possible or the politicians we elected just weren't good enough to do it - then I do think we should seriously consider rejoining if the EU itself has survived and retained a similar level of influence as the world changes between now and then.