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Professor Gwythian Prins believes the EU has sown the seeds of its own destruction through ever-greater complexity and meddling as the benefits for its citizens shrivel.

Voting to leave the doomed bloc was thus “most appropriate and prudent” – not as Remainers claimed, the act of “stupid or culturally primitive racists” he said.

He urged Theresa May to be tougher with Brussels, because the pro-EU elites are “cult-like” and impossible to reason with.

The African colonial era expert was a history and politics tutor at the University of Cambridge and is now emeritus research professor at the London School of Economics.

His findings are on the Briefings for Brexit website. Professor Prins used a method created by the American anthropologist Professor Joseph Tainter to analyse the collapse of ancient empires like Rome, Minoa and Egypt.