Voters were blown over by a blizzard of information, misinformation, propaganda and downright lies during the run up to last year's EU referendum.
Those that went to the ballot could have been forgiven for not knowing who to believe and which way to vote.
As European law expert Prof Michael Dougan said while the Remain camp had 'not covered themselves in glory at points with their use of dodgy statistics' the Leave side had 'degenerated into dishonesty...on an industrial scale'.
Nobody knows what deal - if any - the UK will have with the EU when it leaves by the end of March 2019.
Indeed no-one can say for sure how Brexit will pan out once the UK is outside the EU.
However, there are a number of claims made during the campaign that turned out to be, beyond all reasonable doubt, rubbish.
And here they are...
1. German car makers will get us a good trade deal
We were told repeatedly in the run up to the referendum that there was zero chance of German industry allowing us to leave the EU without a good trade deal.
“Within minutes of a vote for Brexit the CEO’s of Mercedes, BMW, VW and Audi will be knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding that there be no barriers to German access to the British market," said David Davis, now the Brexit Secretary, during the referendum campaign.
Except it turns out that they are doing the exact opposite.
Germany's industrial giants have robustly said they do not want the Single Market put at risk by allowing lower-priced rivals to flood the EU with cheaper products by a British back door outside the EU.
"Defending the single market, a key European project, must be the priority for the European Union,” Dieter Kempf, president of the German Federation of Industries lobby group which represents around 100,000 companies.
Albrecht Ritschl, a professor at the London School of Economics, pointed out that while German industrialists would lose a key market if Britain crashes out of the EU, they would also have less competition within it.
"The net damage would perhaps be quite small," he said.
2. Turkey is joining the EU
In one of the most egregious examples of scaremongering in modern politics, the Vote Leave campaign released posters announcing: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU.”
It’s not.
Turkey applied to join the European Economic Community in 1987 but its chances of joining the EU have all but collapsed. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an election debate this month that the “fact is clear that Turkey should not become an EU member”.
There deep concern about the country’s drift towards authoritarianism, the arrests of thousands of people in the wake of last year’s failed coup, and the restoration of the death penalty would kill any remaining chances of Turkey replacing the UK as the 28th member state.
3. The NHS is going to get an extra £350m a week
This claim on the side of a bus was wrong in almost every possible way.
Our contribution was never £350m in the first place - once you subtract everything we get back, it was around £164m.
And that money won't simply just be flowing back into the Treasury coffers. Firstly, we now look certain to have to continue paying into the EU after Brexit.
And secondly, the amount of tax that the Government collects looks like to fall by an even larger sum as parts of the banking industry relocate to the EU.
Even after that, the Government has refused to commit to how it would spend any extra cash, if there is any.
Theresa May stated in March that there are “lots of things to think about” when it comes to considering how any cash would be spent.
4. We can use our clout to negotiate individual deals with EU states
In the final-leg run-up to the referendum last year, David Davis – who is now Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union – painted a picture of the UK’s negotiator darting not to Brussels but to Berlin to strike a bespoke trade deal “immediately after Brexit”.
He anticipated that similar deals could be reached with the French who would want to protect food and wine exports, with Italians who will want to ensure its fashion industry does not take a knock, and with the Polish.
However, the UK has been sucked into a Brussels-led negotiating process with the 27 other member states refusing to break ranks. The EU won’t even start discussing a future trade deal until vexing issues like the divorce bill, the rights of European citizens and the border with Ireland are addressed.
5. We can be like Norway
Why shouldn't we be like Norway, they asked us before the referendum?
And why indeed - because now we're told that option was never on the table at all.
Norway and Iceland both enjoy many of the benefits of the single market and exporters are spared bureaucracy in return for following common rules.
Back in 2011, Nigel Farage proposed using European Economic Area membership, which Norway and Iceland have, as “a holding position from which we can negotiate as the European Union’s biggest export market in the world”.
There is a widely-shared clip of leading Conservative eurosceptic Daniel Hannan saying that “absolutely no-one is talking about threatening our place in the single market”.
Since then, opposition to staying in the EEA or joining the European Free Trade Association (which includes Switzerland) has hardened – even as a transitional stage.
Brexit Secretary Mr Davis this week described it as the “worst of all outcomes”.
Eurosceptics in the Leave Means Leave campaign are now pushing for a “clean Brexit” which would mean “leaving the Single Market, leaving the customs union and UK courts no longer being subservient to the European Court of Justice”. Among those who fought so successfully for an Out vote last year, staying in these organisations would seem like getting divorced but not moving out of the house.
6. We'll be able to negotiate a free trade area larger than the EU in two years
Back in July last year, now-Brexit Secretary Mr Davis had very high hopes for striking transformative trade deals around the world.
He wrote: “[Within] two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, and therefore before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU. Trade deals with the US and China alone will give us a trade area almost twice the size of the EU, and of course we will also be seeking deals with Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, the UAE, Indonesia – and many others.”
However, this week it was reported that the Government lacks the capacity to conduct such an epic series of negotiations so the focus is understood to be on temporarily duplicating the deals that the UK has an EU member.
International Trade Secretary Liam Fox told Politico: “There are a number of countries who said they would like to move directly to a new free-trade agreement but we have said we are simply unable to do that at the moment. It requires the willingness of the country involved to want to move the process further on and it’s dependent on our own capacity in our own department.”
The challenge of ensuring new trade deals are in place is immense.
A recent FT analysis stated: “While Brexit is often cast as an affair between Brussels and London, in practice Britain’s exit will open more than 750 separate time-pressured mini-negotiations worldwide... And there are no obvious shortcuts: even a basic transition after 2019 requires not just EU-UK approval, but the deal-by-deal authorisation of every third country involved.”
7. We'll be free of the shackles of the European Court of Justice
A casual listener to Theresa May’s landmark Lancaster House Brexit speech might have come away with the impression that the days anyone in the UK having anything to do with the European Court of Justice are about to end.
She declared: “We will take back control of our laws and put an end to the jurisdiction of the European court in Britain.”
However, the UK wants to negotiate a “deep and special partnership” with the EU – and a way needs to be found to settle disputes and police the terms of the withdrawal agreement.
The UK Government has published a paper on how this can be done. It states that there “are a number of existing precedents where the EU has reached agreements with third countries which provide for a close cooperative relationship without the [European Court of Justice] having direct jurisdiction over those countries.”
Labour Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer could sniff a u-turn, commenting that this talk of avoiding only the “direct jurisdiction” of the court “appears to contradict the red line laid [that] there could be no future role of the ECJ and that all laws will be interpreted by judges in this country.”
Prominent Conservative eurosceptic Bernard Jenkin was also quoted sounding unimpressed, saying: “The ECJ should not have any role in interpreting any agreement between the EU and the UK.”
8. David Cameron will stay Prime Minister
It has to be noted that David Cameron was adamant he would not resign if the country voted for Brexit.
He told Andrew Marr in June last year: “If we vote to leave will we carry out that instruction? Yes.
“Will I carry on as Prime Minister? Yes.
“Will I construct a Government that includes all the talents of the Conservative Party? Yes.”
He didn’t trigger Article 50 and he resigned as PM and Tory leader, leaving it to Theresa May to appoint Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary and put Liam Fox in charge of trade deals.
As for his warning that a vote for Brexit was tantamount to putting “a bomb under our economy”, it remains to be seen.
9. That our research and science could expect the same funding
UK scientists are already being dropped from EU-funded projects because funding cannot be guaranteed, it has been reported.
Scientific leaders have been calling for reassurances of the original commitments by Leave campaigners to match EU funding until 2020 - yet with no absolute promises forthcoming.
This article originally appeared on Wales Online.
