Clean Brexit. By Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons. Biteback; 382 pages; £20.

Making a Success of Brexit and Reforming the EU. By Roger Bootle. Nicholas Brealey; 353 pages; £10.99 and $19.95.

How to Stop Brexit (and Make Britain Great Again). By Nick Clegg. Bodley Head; 149 pages; £8.99.

Brexit and British Politics. By Geoffrey Evans and Anand Menon. Polity; 139 pages; £12.99.

SIXTEEN months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the political debate over Brexit seems as intense as ever. That belies one of the hopes of David Cameron, the Tory prime minister who called the referendum, when he claimed to be drawing a poison that had long infected British politics. Publishers, writers and bloggers alike have not been slow to spot the market that the poison has created. Yet too many of the books and pamphlets that have been published since the vote amount to little more than a re-run of the same old arguments over whether to remain or leave. Four recent works, though, do better than most at avoiding that trap.

Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons, two pro-Brexit economists, insist it does not come in hard or soft versions. To them the choice is between clean (meaning fully out of the EU and its single market) and messy (meaning a half-in, half-out position akin to those of Norway or Switzerland). Yet during the campaign many Brexiteers insisted there would be no question of leaving the single market. Even now, a few recalcitrants favour joining Norway in the European Economic Area (EEA), whose members are in that market. Mr Halligan and Mr Lyons prefer the mantra of Theresa May, Mr Cameron’s successor, that Brexit means taking back control of laws, borders and money—which they (and she) insist necessitates leaving both the single market and the customs union.

Unlike some hardliners, the two authors acknowledge that this may involve short-term economic costs, although they think the Treasury and other official forecasters have hugely exaggerated these. But they are convinced that in the long run Brexit will produce big gains. They note that 90% of future global growth will be outside the EU, and they have hopes of a string of free-trade deals to benefit from this. Better (and less) regulation and an escape from European protectionism could thus promote a genuinely global Britain.

It is an attractive vision. But it is not clear exactly how EU (or EEA) membership stands in its way. Germany exports four times as much as Britain to China. The Netherlands (like Britain) has one of the least regulated product and labour markets in the OECD club of rich countries. EEA members are able to strike free-trade deals with third countries. Moreover, many of the ills that the authors want to cure—low productivity, inadequate training, a dysfunctional housing market, poor infrastructure—have little to do with EU membership. It is hard to see how Brexit will help them.

Roger Bootle, another economist, will have none of such pessimism. He accepts that Britain has deep problems, but he sees escaping from the EU as a crucial solution. His book is an expansion of his earlier work, “The Trouble with Europe”, published in 2014. He, too, insists that there is a bright future for a post-Brexit Britain. Much of his argument rests on the gains to be made from no longer being shackled to an underperforming and undemocratic club.

His biggest beefs with the EU concern what he calls such disasters as the single currency, the refugee crisis and the passport-free Schengen zone. Yet Britain has long had opt-outs from these. Mr Cameron even negotiated an opt-out from the goal of ever-closer union. Some of the Brexiteers’ ambitions could have been achieved while remaining in a looser, multispeed, multi-tier form of union, which was emerging even before the referendum.

That vision is also central to Nick Clegg’s new book. The former Liberal Democrat leader makes two main arguments for stopping Brexit. First, the referendum was won on a false prospectus (such as the famous £350m a week for the NHS advertised on the Leavers’ battle bus). And second, the costs of Brexit are becoming increasingly obvious, with businesses moving out of Britain and the economy clearly lagging behind the rest of Europe.

Mr Clegg now wants Parliament to overrule any Brexit deal negotiated by the government. He calls on readers to join either Labour or the Conservatives so as to put pressure on both main parties to drop their support for Brexit (Sir Vince Cable, now Lib Dem leader, may not be best pleased with this idea). Mr Clegg suggests that Sir John Major, a former Tory prime minister, should then be asked to negotiate a new deal that keeps Britain in an outer tier of EU membership. Yet this seems surreal. There is little sign that public opinion on Brexit has changed. It will be both legally and practically hard to reverse course. It is still possible that Brexit may never happen. But right now it seems more likely that Britain will leave the EU with no deal at all.

That would surely make the fallout from Brexit more damaging—and more poisonous. In their book, two political scientists, Geoffrey Evans and Anand Menon, set this in its broader context. Their conclusion is that the Brexit vote has changed British politics fundamentally. It has ended a 40-year socially liberal, pro-market political consensus. It has deepened regional divides, notably between Scotland and England, and between London and the rest of the country. It has set older against younger voters. And it may even have paved the way for the election of a neo-Marxist Labour prime minister. Mr Cameron, one assumes, never dreamed of that.