EU Referendum: PETER RHODES on why he'll be voting to leave the EU tomorrow

If you want out, then vote Leave, says Peter Rhodes.

But there is a third scenario. If like millions of Brits you are dithering somewhere in between, then for goodness' sake vote Leave.

If Britain votes Remain, it's all over. We will be sucked ever deeper into something most of us never wanted. And don't believe all that baloney about "being at the heart of Europe" and "reforming the EU from within". It never happens.

Vote Remain and you have only one outcome. Vote Leave and you have two.

The first option after a Leave victory is that David Cameron could renegotiate with Brussels one last time from a position of immense strength. Britain is not the only member-state fed up with the EU. Britain might start a continent-wide campaign for the Common Market we always wanted, the one Britain embraced by a healthy 2:1 majority in the referendum of 1975 – a free-trade area of sovereign democracies.

A Leave vote will give us the chance to demand it. And if Brussels digs its heels in and refuses, then it's option two: we leave. And why not? Would any Brit willingly sign up to the EU of the future?

Look at the map. Consider the little Common Market we joined in the 1970s, a cluster of six prosperous, like-minded European nations. Now look at today's massive 28-state EU. Then add in the Balkan states who would love to join.

Most controversially, and despite all David Cameron's denials, add mighty Turkey, too. During this campaign, the Prime Minister has scornfully predicted Turkey might not join the EU until the year 3000. Yet only six years ago he declared: "Turkey deserves its place at the top table of European politics – and that is what I will fight for." Why should we believe what he promises us any more than what he promises Turkey.

So for the sake of argument, let's include Turkey in the EU map of the future. In a few decades from now, England could be a province of a vast nation under the EU flag whose borders touch Russia, Syria and Iraq. We could be drawn deep – far too deep - into tinderbox regions still simmering with border disputes, clan feuds and organised crime.

If this referendum were solely about economics for the next five years or so, voting Remain might be the wiser option. Indeed, for the selfish sake of a quiet life, part of me hopes for a Remain victory.

But it's not just about the economy. We are making a strategic decision which could settle Britain's fate for all time.

I'm not going to pretend that immigration is a burning issue for me. It chiefly affects London, the South-East and the inner-cities, not my little slice of suburbia.

In the same way, don't expect me to get all pious and one-nation Toryish about migration driving down the British worker's wages. It is blatant hypocrisy to do so when, every time I need a plumber or electrician, I benefit from those driven-down rates.

My concern is not principally about economics or population, although those two factors have dominated the debate.

I'm not even unduly worried about the EU as it is now, a floundering bureaucracy obsessed with rules and regulations for their own sake which has overseen the destruction of the Greek economy and the spread of mass migration across the south of the continent. Today's EU may be a global embarrassment and a fine example of how not to manage a continent but it is, in terms of human lives, fairly harmless.

What keeps me awake at night is the superstate it will become. Brussels has been careful not to use the F-word lately but the old dream of a federal EU, with existing nations reduced to canton-sized units such as Mercia and Catalonia, is still alive and well in the corridors of power.

And so, as some British generals and security experts have pointed out, is the EU's old dream of its own armed forces. Britain has quite enough commitments with Nato. The last thing we need is to be contributing our Guards, Lancers and Rifles to some crackpot adventures dictated from Brussels.

Without us after a Leave vote, the EU will continue to grow. We should trade with it and be friends with it. But join it? Be part of it? Enmesh ourselves in all its weaknesses and instability? For pity's sake, why? The idea fills me with foreboding.

The lesson of history is that the safest relationship Britain can have with Europe is a cordial but arm's-length one. Our place is on the outside, a big, confident, liberal, globally-trading nation famed for its democracy, tolerance, progressiveness, humanity and the rule of British justice.

After the shock of this UK rebellion, Brussels will surely want no more referendums. There has been a serious suggestion that criticising the EU could become a crime on a par with blasphemy. In future, demanding change could be impossible. Campaigning for other referendums might even be illegal. Tomorrow's vote may be the last vote we get.

There is much that is good to be salvaged from the so-called European Project. But we won't get it by voting Remain. And that's why I'll be voting to leave.