WITH just over a year to go before we leave the EU, it is becoming clearer by the week that punishment and constraint of the UK are at the heart of the EU's position on Brexit.

This week details were leaked of some 37 new laws that the EU could force upon the UK during the two-year transition period, which begins on March 29, 2019: directives which we will have no power to stop - and no say over their imposition. Jacob Rees-Mogg talked of our becoming a "vassal state" of the EU if we allow Brussels to push ahead with its punitive Brexit plans - and it looks as though he may be correct.

Seasoned commentators are increasingly accepting that a so-called soft Brexit is simply not going to happen, on the grounds of impossibility. The EU is determined to punish Britain for its decision to leave the over-reaching, undemocratic organisation. And one of the most effective ways of doing that will be to exert as much control over us as it can during the transition period.

Some of the directives revealed in the Whitehall analysis leaked this week will affect us for decades to come - and yet they are being imposed by an organisation which we will already have left. Included in the list of transition-period proposed directives is one under which every British household will be forced to have four different recycling bins in order to reach EU targets, compelling Britain to increase its recycling rates from 44 per cent to an "unfeasible" (according to ministers) 77 per cent.

A strategy paper leaked to the Financial Times last week showed that the EU has every intention of shackling Britain post-Brexit by banning or restricting domestic plans to cut taxes or to change our employment law, under threat of sanctions. To stop a post-Brexit Britain "gain[ing] competitiveness" through our tax regime, the EU is prepared to treat us as a pariah state if we defy the rules they wish to impose upon us after we have left.

One of the cornerstones of the English rule of law is that no legislation can be imposed retrospectively; and yet, in some ways, if we allow the EU to carry out its threats, that is what we will implicitly be accepting for our country after Brexit. We may well be in a "transition period" for two years after March 29, 2019 - but that doesn't alter the fact that we will have left the EU. We will no longer be members; we will have no power of veto; and we will have no voting rights. How, then, can it be right that we should accept and be expected to abide by new laws and regulations passed by an organisation of which we are no longer a member? Such a proposition is akin to a company telling a worker who has resigned and is working out their notice that they are going to control their career for the next two decades - and expecting the soon-to-depart employee to accept that.

Leaving the EU in name only is not really leaving the EU - and we need clarity on the terms of our departure ever more urgently. Most people in the country - the more rabid Remainers aside - have accepted that we are leaving. Our leaving has been agreed by parliament, following the clear result of the 2016 referendum; and it forms part of both the Conservative and Labour parties' manifestos. Yet the EU itself clearly believes that if it plays hardball for long enough - and threatens enough sanctions, punishments and downright unreasonable conditions - Britain will capitulate to its demands, if not decide to reverse the Brexit decision. The likes of Conservative MP Anna Soubrey, the Lib Dem's Tim Farron and many other Remainers will most likely be praying for that most unlikely of scenarios to come about.

By threatening sanctions; by invoking up to 40 new directives on Britain post-Brexit; by its ongoing insistence on imposing curbs and restraints upon Britain after we leave, the EU itself is making a soft Brexit increasingly impossible. By attempting to back us into a corner (and the government's dithering and lack of clear vision has in no small part allowed this to happen), the EU is leaving us with few options. But it is not leaving us with no options. We can walk away under World Trade Organisation rules and forge our own, sovereign, democratic way in the world, free from sanctions and threats of sanctions by a fatally flawed organisation which may well not survive the next two decades.

Being the first to desert the sinking ship doesn't make us rats. It is time the undemocratic EU stopped treating us as though we were.

POOR Jeremy Vine. The affable and courteous Radio 2 presenter found himself being harangued by a militant vegan on his show last week - and all because of a ham butty.

Interviewing the preposterously named Joey Carbstrong, nee Armstrong, on his show, Mr Vine was called out (as they say these days) by his vegan guest when he caught sight of the presenter's lunchtime cheese and ham sandwich. "Your sandwich has a piece of pig's body in there - a dead pig that didn't want to die," Mr Carbstrong charmlessly pointed out to Mr Vine, before going on to declare that the cheese element of the sandwich was also offending him, on the grounds that dairy farming "is akin to rape".

Rather than tell the loutish Mr Carbstrong where to get off, Vine took the tirade in good part, tweeting later "when interviewing a militant vegan, don't leave a ham sandwich in view". Carbstrong might well be full of the milk of human kindness towards animals - but he is doing the vegan cause no good whatsoever with such boorish and aggressive behaviour. Militants are so tiresomely unpleasant - forcing their world view down people's throats and believing the "rightness" of their cause affords them carte blanche to be rude and downright unpleasant. It doesn't. I'd describe Mr Carbstrong as pig-ignorant - but he'd only take it as a compliment.

LARRY the Downing Street cat has been in the news this week, standing accused of dereliction of his duties.

The workshy moggy, which resides at No 10 and is chief mouser to the Cabinet Office, has been under-performing in his role of late by refusing to catch any rodents. As a cat lover, I'm a bit of a fan of Larry, not least because he bears a striking resemblance to one of my own much-missed cats, Theo. He (Larry) provides plenty of feline-based entertainment for the Downing Street press corps and is regularly filmed strolling nonchalantly up to the front door of the prime minister's residence and demanding to be let in - and always getting his way, as cats invariably do.

Larry's work-related performance has been so poor recently that Downing Street has been forced to employ the services of rodent control specialists, it is reported - and Larry may well be on a formal written warning as a result. Worryingly for Larry, he has some tough competition in the shape of Palmerston, the Foreign Office mouser who is much more aggressive; and who is performing his government role far more effectively than the present incumbent of No 10.

Could Larry's days be numbered and Palmerston be set to get the top job? We all know it's dog-eat-dog in the murky world of politics, but if Larry doesn't start showing that he understands it's also cat-eat-mouse, he may well soon be looking for a new home.