Boris Johnson’s Brexit vision is built on lower standards of environmental, consumer and worker protection

There are good arguments for leaving the European Union. We need not go into them here, because The Independent’s view is that they are outweighed by the benefits of staying.

But there are also bad arguments for leaving the EU, and one of the worst is that we would be free to strike trade deals with exciting new markets that we would not be able to negotiate while being held back by the bureaucratic colossus of Brussels.

This has never been remotely plausible. As we report, the government is trying to strip out protection of food standards in post-Brexit trade laws, which gives the game away. The only trade deals the UK could do on its own that it could not do as part of the EU would involve lowering our standards.

The most obvious case is trade with the US, and the familiar examples are of chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-fed beef. But the same principle applies to trade with the emerging economies of Asia and Africa. Without the EU’s huge negotiating power, the only way the UK would be able to do deals would be by compromising on safety or environmental standards.

And this problem with Brexit is not limited to trade. A document leaked to the Financial Times this week revealed that, contrary to the prime minister’s rhetoric about protecting workers’ rights, the government believes it has preserved its ability to diverge from EU standards in future. “UK negotiators successfully resisted the inclusion of all UK-wide level playing field rules” that had been in Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the paper boasts.

This makes perfect sense. After all, what is the point of leaving the EU unless it is to diverge from EU rules and regulations? And, given that in most cases EU member states are allowed to set higher standards than the EU minimum, the only point of gaining “flexibility” is to be flexible downwards.

As Tony Blair has argued, the economic case for leaving the EU is either painful or pointless. Either we want to lower standards of environmental, consumer or worker protection, in which case leaving will be painful; or we do not, in which case leaving is pointless.

There may be other arguments for leaving. The EU is imperfectly democratic. There is a strong case that national governments should decide who can come into the country and who cannot. But any argument that Brexit will set us free economically to become more prosperous is built on a false premise.