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The reality is that the UK is perfectly free to leave the EU whenever (and, to an extent, however) it wishes. The process of leaving, however, requires either agreeing on a withdrawal agreement or deciding not to have one of them. The EU has presented a withdrawal agreement which the UK is entirely free to accept or ignore. For reasons connected more to domestic public opinion, the government of the UK has decided to behave as if there’s a magical third option, which isn’t the case.

The UK functioned incredibly well for such a small island nation until about sixty years ago. They then hit the reconstruction of the 40s and 50s and became a bit too complacent, and in the competitive world of countries who had rebuilt themselves after the second world war and who kept on developing their industries and their expertise, the Brits relative position went downhill very quickly indeed. In one generation they fell from being a world superpower to being the sick man of Europe (1973 when they joined the EEC)

So they joined the Common Market in order to help their industries and productivity get back on track and in the forty years that followed, British systems and infrastructure became ever-more closely aligned with the EEC/EC/EU at each stage of its evolution. For two generations now, the rules and practices of the EU have been built into British rules and practices. British industries took the fact of EU membership as a given, a constant.

To use an analogy here, imagine a business park where the companies in each of the buildings interact and trade with each other. They have direct communication lines between each other, there are roads that connect them all. To move a product from one business to another you only need a van, and people can walk freely from one business to the next to meet and do deals with each other. And then one day there is an earthquake, and one of the buildings -we'll call it UK Ltd - becomes separated from the rest by a thirty-foot crack.It is suddenly inaccessible to the others - its products can no longer be used by the other businesses in the park, they can no longer meet with or talk to the people who work there because the phone and data lines have been severed. A bridge needs to be built in order to restore access, phone and data cables need to be reinstalled, all that will cost money and will take time, and until it happens, the only way to get goods from one side of the chasm to the other is by hiring a crane to lift them across, and that costs money and it takes a lot longer than doing it with a van. So the rest of the businesses find other suppliers to do what UK Ltd did before the earthquake and the employees in all those other businesses continue to prosper. And then a year later, when the bridge is finally built and the cables have been relaid, UK Ltd comes knocking on their door and says "TaDa! We're back!" and the others say "well that's great, but we don't need your products any more, we've found another supplier."

Or the UK leaving the EU is reasonably close to the process for leaving a gym. Typically, if you’re a member of the gym, you can use the showers, the sauna, the exercise equipment, and so on. You can even sign up for a yoga or Pilates class if either is on offer.

When you leave the gym, you either lose access to those facilities or have to pay for them on a per-session basis. Strangely enough, that’s what leaving the EU is like, too.