My favourite film is Apollo 13, the story of the doomed 1970 moon mission. In a key scene, Jim Lovell, the commander, radios mission control. “The earth’s getting pretty big in the window, fellers,”

he calls. “We’re gonna need a plan for re-entry.” On the ground, mission commander Gene Krantz shrugs his shoulders and the message is returned “We’re just working on that now.” So it is with the referendum next week. If the opinion polls are to be believed, Parliament will be asked to extract the UK from the European Union. If that is the will of the electorate, so be it. The problem is, we don’t have a plan for exit.

Government policy is to stay in, and rules governing the civil service state that no taxpayer’s money should be spent on exploring that which is not government policy – quite rightly so, by the way. It is up to the Leave campaign to put forward suggestions about what an independent Britain should look like.

Let me demonstrate the problem in the event of Brexit. Immigration is the big issue people are worried View from Westminster about, so it is right that we create a system of control on immigration.

But we also know that tariff free access to the single market (45 per cent of our total trade) will come with the unacceptable cost of free movement of people (as the nonmember Norwegians have now).

So we will need to adopt some sort of WTO tariff model for trade with the EU single market.

We also know that the unallocated cost of EU membership is about £8 billion a year, but the leave campaign want this money spent on the NHS – a perfectly reasonable idea.

But EU related tariffs alone will cost the UK taxpayer around £9 billion a year, allocated to consumers and exporters. So the message we are being given is that people will be happy to pay these extra taxes over and above their existing taxes, in order to spend more on the NHS and remove free immigration. Or should we allocate the savings in EU membership fees to a corresponding cut in VAT rates to mitigate the extra costs to consumers?

We can do any of this – and more.

But could someone please tell us what they want if we actually do come out of the EU.

CONTACT YOUR MP

Email: mark.garnier.mp@parliament.uk

Telephone: 020 7219 7198 or 01562 746771

Write: 9a Lower Mill Street, Kidderminster, DY11 6UU, or House of Commons, Westminster, London