Not for the first time, Eddie, you seem to have grasped the wrong end of the stick.
There are no “conditions” to be met for our leaving. We simply leave on a date of our choosing. This could be tomorrow if we chose, but it won’t, because of this:
The “negotiations” to which you refer are to hammer out the details of our future relationship with what remains of the EU. It would be foolish to simply walk away with no notice. It would help neither side because we (and the rest) have certain rights and responsibilities as members and it is right and proper that these should be terminated in a controlled fashion. It is a little more complicated than resigning from a gentlemen’s club. Furthermore, as you rightly point out, it would do our credibility no good at all to chuck a tantrum. However, It is also proper that we should have no representation within the EU at these negotiations. They are negotiations between the UK and the EU (without the UK) and it would not be appropriate for us to influence their position. (Imagine divorce negotiations where the husband has influence over the wife’s solicitor when a settlement is being reached).
There is no need for either side to be childish and I believe they won’t be. Trade between the UK and the other EU countries is mutually beneficial and will continue to be so. Also bear in mind that the rest of the EU has a huge trade surplus with the UK (they sell to us far more than we do to them). It is in nobody’s interests to jeopardise this trade.
You paint a very dark picture and you seem filled with pessimism. As I have said before, in ten years’ time observers will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. The UK will prosper having forged a different but equally advantageous relationship with the rest of Europe as well as pursuing its own agenda elsewhere in the world (which we presently cannot do). Europe will have gone its own way. Personally I believe the EU will not exist in ten years’ time – certainly not in its current form anyway. The euro will in all probability have been rightfully consigned to the dustbin. We will not be unaffected by all this, but to cope with the chaos we will be able to take decisions that are in our interests alone.
I am amazed that younger people voted to remain. I thought they had more go in them and would not be keen to be shackled to a moribund, shrinking, chaotic economy whose leaders should not be trusted to run a whelk stall, let alone a continent. I thought they’d prefer instead to strike out in the wider world (the rest of which has a population almost fifteen times that of the EU). But I suppose it all depends on what they’ve been told and what they believe. The next two or three years will be rocky and there will be turbulent times ahead. Few people much over 65 will reap the full rewards of last Thursday’s decision. But (provided the government gets on with the separation and stops fannying around, worrying about a new leader and who signs the letter of resignation) the next generation will thank us oldies for dragging them out of the 1950s in 2016.