 I'm delighted this afternoon to be joined by Professor David Feldman, who's the Roundsball Professor of English Law at the University of Cambridge. David, could you introduce us to your field of expertise and tell us a little bit about how it might be important in the run-up to the referendum? I'm a constitutional lawyer and a public lawyer generally, and I also have an interest in human rights and civil liberties, and the main significance of the referendum for my field is the way in which a decision, one way or the other, and indeed the decision to have the referendum at all has affected constitutional principles, including the idea of representative government, the idea that important decisions about the direction of the country are taken not by us, but by the people we elect to make those sort of decisions on our behalf, and on the so-called legislative sovereignty of parliament, and also on the way in which government is carried on, cabinet government, the idea of government as a collective activity with common responsibility to the House of Commons and, to a lesser extent, the House of Lords. I think all of those are affected by the way in which the referendum has been set up and the possible implications of the result. Okay, so what are the possible implications, for instance, a leave vote on the way we practice democracy in this country? Well, the first point to note is that we don't know the answer to that, because we've never in the past had a referendum in which there's been a result which has gone contrary to the expressed view of the leader of our government, our national government, and the possibilities that might arise if that were to happen would be extremely uncertain. First of all, we would presumably have the question, or it may only be a theoretical question, whether the government was prepared to accept and act on the decision expressed through the referendum. Of course, the referendum is non-binding, and if it were to become binding, then it would be a serious restriction of what we previously thought of as parliamentary sovereignty, the power of our representatives in Parliament to decide and legislate for important matters of public policy. It would also cause problems for cabinet government itself, because the cabinet is usually seen as a unit. We expect collective responsibility, and that's been relaxed for the period of the campaign, but it would be extremely awkward if, let's say, there were an exit vote, Mr Cameron decided to stay on as Prime Minister, and decided also to accept the need to negotiate towards an exit, but he presumably wouldn't be willing to do that. So we'd have a situation where within cabinet there'd be a continuing division and a known division of opinion, and it may even be possible that the job would be delegated to a cross-party group, because of course the cabinet at the moment is a single party, a cross-party group outside the cabinet, and that would be revolutionary to have people outside the cabinet representing the crown in negotiations on the international plane. So that would be setting a new precedent? It would be a new precedent, and who knows where it would go. So there's no historical background by which we could inform ourselves as to how that would work? No. For differences within cabinet, we have, for example, the agreement between the Conservative and Lib Dem coalition partners between 2010 and 2015, where they agreed in advance which topics would be subject to collective responsibility and which would be accepted from collective responsibility so that the Lib Dems could pursue their separate agenda. That might happen, but whether it would work and how it would work within a single party, I don't know. So how do you foresee the process of leaving, actually panning out in the event of a vote to leave next week? Well, there would have to be negotiations. The process could go on for some considerable time. The framework for the negotiations would be set once the starting pistol is fired by Article 50 on the Treaty on the European Union. And Article 50 requires negotiations among the member states and a solution to be negotiated and concluded by the Union through its council acting by qualified majority voting. But the UK wouldn't be part of the council for this purpose. So we'd be in the position of outsiders negotiating with the insiders and the insiders would have to produce a qualified majority vote for whatever solution was eventually negotiated. That would have to include the arrangements for any continuing trade relationship. So you'd have a problem for the negotiators, first of all, by having to deal with the EU authorities, but also having to keep the domestic government and parliament on side as the process was continuing. We know what the procedure would be for deciding whether the negotiated settlement was satisfactory from an EU perspective. We don't yet know what the procedure would be for deciding that from a UK perspective. It would be a treaty matter. It would require quite possibly a further referendum in the UK to approve the treaty before legislation could be implemented or indeed the treaty could be ratified on behalf of the Crown. So there's a significant amount of negotiations take place? Negotiations take place and then when it comes to deciding whether to ratify the new treaty, you would I think probably be making up the procedures as you went along to some extent. And then you'll have to get the relevant legislation through the two houses of parliament, which may or may not be easy. Well, we've already seen a significant amount of disagreement from both or from all major parties haven't we? So getting agreement on the format of the legislation is going to be very painful. Yes, and it could be a knife edge piece of political negotiation getting it through the commons and the lords. Which is being undertaken in an environment whereby there's been major splits in the party that has majority in the House of Commons. It would be a cross-party arrangement, whatever happens, I think. Sure. So great challenges to our constitutional system. So what's the one key fact or message that you would like that you feel should be better communicated in the run up to the referendum? Well, we've seen across the board that the big fact which people are either not willing to communicate or not willing to accept when it is communicated is the sheer level of uncertainty on all these fronts. But it is true of the constitutional setup as it is of the economy and trade and all those other things, immigration. And if I can give you just one example of the difficulty, we've heard about how different parts are claiming that a particular level of a proportion of legislation in this country actually stems from the EU. What isn't generally understood or discussed, I think, first of all, that the amount of legislation simply can't be counted. Because you can't artificially go through and say, well, there are so many articles on this, so many sections on that, so many statutes on the other. It's all much more mixed up together and EU law and UK law march side by side in this area. But also it's not at all clear what's meant when people say that Parliament would be sovereign if we withdrew. Because, of course, one of the problems is we don't know whether Parliament would have to continue to accept that the EU could legislate for us notwithstanding parliamentary disapproval. If we entered into, let's say, a trade arrangement access to the single market, which required us to continue to give effect to EU law relating to the single market. And that's a very large area of EU law. So it is not the case that we are likely to find suddenly that we are an EU law free zone if we came out. Even if we wanted to be, you'd need to go through an immensely complicated process of unpicking all the different bits of EU law. And then deciding by some massive law reform review process which bits you wanted to keep, which bits you wanted to change and which bits you wanted to repeal or just get rid of. And that would keep a battery of lawyers, politicians and public administrators happily occupied for a very long time. And you'd need expertise across the whole range of areas of law to which the EU has contributed over the last, I was going to say over the last 43 years, but it's actually more than 43 years because of course when we went in in 1973 we inherited the EU law build-up since 1957. So we're really talking about nearly 60 years and it would be 60 years worth of EU law that would need to be unpicked and reviewed. And then we'd need a massive legislative operation, some of which might be done through Parliament, but some of it might be done through subordinate legislation to arrive at a situation where we had just so much EU law left with us as we wanted, perhaps converted into a new form. And that would be an extremely interesting task, but not a quick job. There's a lot of work ahead. A lot of work ahead and it's very uncertain exactly where we'd end up. So I think it is the uncertainty that's the biggest fact that needs to be borne in mind. Well that's really extremely helpful. Thank you very much. Thank you.