[brainwad]

That's far from obvious. The UK is 3x the population of Australia, which manages fine without deep economic integrations. The problem of Brexit is not that it is impossible to go it alone as a middle power; it's just an unnecessary handicap when you border a 450m head market but want to ignore them and act like you are an island at the arse end of the world.

[iso1631]

Austrailia is 80 times the size of the UK, it has a lot of resources - 240 times as much space per person than the UK.

The UK is too large to be an independent city state, but too small to be self sufficient.