 I'm here today with Professor Kenneth Armstrong, who's the director of the Centre for European Legal Studies here in Cambridge, and we're going to be talking today about the process of potentially leaving the European Union following a referendum vote to leave in June. So could you start by saying a little bit about the nuts and bolts of the process of leaving? Well for the first time we have an actual provision in the EU treaties that says what should happen when a member state wants to withdraw, and that's known as Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, and it sets down the process for an orderly exit, if you like, from the European Union. And what does that look like? What are the essential steps in that orderly process of leaving? The first step in the process is that the state that wants to withdraw has to notify the heads of state and government of the other member states, and that wouldn't necessarily be automatic from a referendum, the referendum could take place, and there's nothing that then automatically triggers Article 50. However the Prime Minister has made clear that in the event of a vote to leave the European Union, then very quickly the request would be made to the European Council to indicate that the UK was intending to withdraw. After that point there will then be a period of negotiation and discussion that is supposed to take place within a two-year window for an agreement to be reached between the United Kingdom and the other 27 member states. And if that agreement is reached and comes into force then the UK will withdraw. If that agreement isn't reached there is a possibility for extending negotiations if everybody wants to, but in the event that there is no deal done then the UK would simply withdraw from the European Union without a deal. What would that mean for the UK? For the UK it would be treated within the European Union like any other state that was not a member therefore it wouldn't have the same access to the European single market for example. At some point then the United Kingdom might try and negotiate some other type of agreement and arrangement for example some kind of free trade agreement that would take place between the European Union and the United Kingdom. There's obviously good reason why other EU states may wish to have such an agreement because the UK would still be an important trading partner and business in the UK would certainly wish to see some sort of arrangement in place. So we might see an attempt then to produce a very simple type of free trade arrangement to deal with that. We might also then have to think about the rights of UK citizens who are living and working in EU member states. At the moment they have entitlements and rights directly under EU law those rights would not necessarily remain after the UK withdrew. So it would be in the interest of UK citizens living abroad as well as the EU citizens living in the UK to reach some type of agreement to deal with their rights to reside and work across Europe. There's lots of coverage in the press about the UK potentially doing Switzerland or Norway. What might that look like? There are these other models out there but most of them will still demand that the UK accepts a lot of the rules that exist within the European single market and including rules on the free movement of workers. So I think the idea that the UK would withdraw from the European Union and from its single market and yet rejoin us through one of these types of quite strong trade arrangements is perhaps unlikely. Has this ever happened before in this Article 50 process? This would be the very first use of the process. It was only introduced from 2009. This would be the first occasion and in that respect it's very unknown exactly how the formal rules laid down in Article 50 would play out in practice. Now for some that then leads to the idea that well maybe everything's up for negotiation that everything is possible. I don't think that's quite the case but it's certainly clear that we don't know exactly how this would run in practice. Is there one key message that you'd like to be better communicated about the process of leaving? The process will depend on how extensive the deal might be in terms of how inclusive it might be in terms of trying to manage every single aspect of the UK's future relationships with the European Union. If the aim is to produce something relatively simple and framework, a set of framework principles for example that might guide future relationships, then perhaps that is something that is conceivably doable within two years. But as others have written recently, if the aim is to produce a very comprehensive package, a comprehensive deal among the future arrangement, I think the timetable of two years is very optimistic. Thank you very much.