You may well be right. And it's an interesting POV because the default UK assumption is that of course the EU would accept the UK on demand.

The possibility that there might be loss of face, or strings and conditions, not to mention a certain implicit payback, really isn't on the radar here.

The UK could point out that the City has been convenient for various semi-legal and illegal laundering and tax evasion schemes which have had tacit EU support, so it's not as if the EU is an innocent party. But that might be a little too overt and wouldn't be in the spirit of the game as it's played.

This is worrying because UK as Iceland 2.0 is far from unlikely. We do still have manufacturing and engineering industries of a sort, and Brown has been muttering about green this and that. We also have unexpectedly strong media and broadcast industries, and if it were up to me I'd be pushing the creative industries next to sustainable greenery as a replacement for finance - because we have the talent, but most of it is being wasted or sidelined.

Really we're in a 70s-style transition moment now - from Old Economy to New Economy.

Back then Thatcher and the Friedman Freaks were ideally placed to push through their idea of progress. Currently green tech and creative media are an obvious next step, but neither have the lobbying power nor the so-called intellectual and academic support that finance had at the time, so any transition is likely to be much less smooth and much more dangerous.