June 23, 2016, is a day that will go down in history, a day when Britain's relationship with Europe, and potentially with the rest of the world, changed fundamentally.

As a newspaper reporter in Britain in the late 1990s, I covered a number of stories related to Britain's relationship with the European Union, often about examples of ordinary people whose lives were adversely affected by the regulations imposed by Brussels, such as a market trader who ended up in court because he refused to weigh the produce he sold in metric measurements.

That in itself may not sound serious, but cases like this had much broader implications as they set the precedent that regulations imposed by the European Commission had more authority than the laws passed by the elected British Parliament, making this an issue of sovereignty, about who really had the power to decide the laws which governed the daily lives of the British people.