Conservative backbencher Philip Davies and Laura Sandys, former Conservative MP and chair of the European Movement discuss on the Sunday Politics show whether we should leave the EU.

We are going to see a lot of these "mini-debates" over the next two years, and a lot of us are going to be taking part in them. Most will not necessarily in the august presence of Andrew Neil, or even on television. But, whether a face-to-face or in a small informal group, or in a debate in a village hall, or even at a major event in some grand conference venue, the battle is there to be won.

It is therefore, useful to take a forensic view of this little episode, to evaluate the performance of the two speakers (and Neil) in order to learn what we can from them. Their strengths and weaknesses can be used as a guide, enabling us individually and collectively to improve our own performances.

As to the setting, there can be no great (or any – unless you think differently) objection to how the opening was handled. To give each of the protagonists thirty seconds to make their cases is quite standard, and a fair way of starting proceedings. And there are advantages and disadvantages in any event to going first, so there is no great issue to be made in having Laura Sandys open.

The first thing to come across is that Sandys goes for the "low ground", hitting the jobs and trade buttons. "Every single job in this country is probably seven degrees of separation from some form of export", she asserts. "I think we've got to ensure that we stay in the European Union so that we can trade with Europe and the rest of the world. I think some people think it's an either or. I think it's both".

Had this been me listening to this, awaiting my turn, I think my spirits would have been soaring at the prospect of being able to take the high ground, and relegate her comment to the status of "low drone", which it most emphatically deserves. In my view, Sandys had made a major tactical error.

Not content with the one error, though, Sandys compounds it by appealing to the notional "left". She thus declares: "I also think there are some social issues - that Europe actually created some legislation, regulation that supports maternity rights, equality and as part of the European Union those are irrevocable".

In a limited way this is quite clever. It sets up the European Union as the "protector" of rights, but it is not a theme Sandys develops. Instead, she scoots back to "trade", with more sweeping assertions. Ultimately, she says, "this country needs to be at every top table it can be at. That's its history and that's its future. And so the idea of walking away from one of the – the largest market in the world. I think we'd be very foolish".

Hindsight is dead easy when doing this sort of critique, but there is no need for it here. What Sandys is offering is so tediously predictable that we could almost have written the script for her. The number of times we have heard this, or a close relative, must number in the thousands.

What she has done, unwittingly, is open up the way for the rejoinder successfully used by Owen Paterson, who cheerfully grabs such a gift with both hands, to tell us that we are not "walking away" – the European Union "is leaving us". With its single currency and political integration, it is bent on creating a new country. And, with a new treaty in the offing, as soon as this referendum is out of the way, it will be taking us down a path that we cannot and don't want to follow.

With that as the baseline, it would then have been open to Davies to declare that the task now confronting us was to separate the political baggage from the trade issues, and to create a new relationship based on trade, which is what most of us thought the EU was all about. Sadly, this was not to be. Davies, instead, also takes the low road, but this time following the Ukipesque path. "There are a number of reasons why we must leave", says Davies, "not least because it is "the only way we can control immigration into this country".

One immediately starts wondering whether there is a different sort of immigration, one that involves movement other than into this country, but we let that pass as the heart sinks at the own goal. This is precisely where we don't want to be. In his bid to out-Ukip Ukip, Davies has just contradicted even the "eurosceptic" wing of his party, and lost a massive tranche of his audience.

Clearly anxious not to let Sandy be the only low drone in the room, Davies now matches her, error for error, by taking the low road to tedium.

"But above all else, we'd be better off out of the EU. Every single year, the EU is a smaller and smaller part of the world's economy", he says. "All of the growth in the world economy is in China, India, South America, emerging economies in Africa. That's where all the future growth in the world's economy's going to come from and that's where we need to be".

In full flow, Davies now goes into eurosceptic "dog whistle" mode, not quite foaming at the mouth, eyes swivelling, but no so very far from it. "We built our wealth in this country by being global traders", he says, rant-mode on and running. "We should be ashamed of ourselves that we're handing over £19 billion pounds a year to be part of a backward-looking, inward facing protection racket, which is what the European Union's become, protecting the interests of inefficient European businesses and French farmers".

"We've gotta be much more global in outlook, much more international, much more positive about the world, not stuck in the 1970s. And of course we all want to trade with the EU. We will keep free trade with the EU", he then asserts.

At the end of this dissertation, Neil steps in with the observation that Davies has over-run his time. Turning to Laura Sandys, he says: "You say we should stay in, to trade. Why couldn't we trade if we were outside the EU". And, since Sandys has taken the low road, it is a reasonable question to ask.

Had Sandys been on top of her brief, she might immediately have responded to say that the Single Market had been a huge success in eliminating not only tariffs but also the more recent scourge of international trading – the non-tariff barriers, which were costing global trade far more than tariffs ever did.

Within the EU's Single Market, she could have said, the common regulation had eliminated these barriers, with one set of rules replacing 28, making trading easier and more profitable. Outside the EU, she could then argue, the UK would lose the benefit of the trading system, damaging its economy.

This is a credible case to make, and I've heard many a Europhile make it. But Sandys doesn't even try. Instead, she burbles about the UK trading with the EU and the rest of the world, prompting Neil to invoke the case of Switzerland, which is not in the EU yet exports five times more goods to the EU (per capita) than the UK. Why could we not export [from outside the EU], he asks.

Unfortunately, Neil's intervention puts Sandys back in her comfort zone. She slots effortlessly into mantra-mode. "We could if we had a Norwegian or Swiss model, but we are not there setting the rules, we've got our neighbours setting the rules for us. We end up having to comply on a sector-by-sector basis. It would take ten years to get the agreements in place".

This is the old "no influence" meme – the variation on the fax democracy", but with an added twist. Sandys is conflating the Swiss and Norwegian "models", which allows he to say that to would take ten years to agree a new deal. As a generalisation, this is a lie.

Neil, had he known more, might have picked up this deception, but like the rest of his ilk, his knowledge is skin deep. He doesn't challenge it. Instead, he packages up Sandys's argument: "We would continue to trade outside, but we would have no say in the rules of the game. At the moment we help to build the rules of the game, as we helped to build the Single Market. Why would you give that up?"

With that neat little bow added to the gift-wrapping, he hands it to Davies, who makes an almost total pig's ear of unwrapping it. "Well there's two points", he says. "The first is I'm not sure that we have as much influence as that would suggest", then hilariously muffing QMV and first "quality" and then "qualitative" majority voting, thereby releasing the inner amateur that resides in so many MPs. "More often than not, we're outvoted", Davies emphasises, "We're not actually having a great say over the rules".

Despite that, it's not a bad point to make, but the inner amateur fails totally to deploy the killer line: most of the rules are now made at international level, where we have no representation while, if we left the EU, we would be able to negotiate for ourselves, at the global top tables, increasing our influence.

Instead of delivering this killer shot, Davies decides to load his magazine with blanks, as he laboriously ladles out his "other point": "This idea that we could only negotiate as good a deal as Switzerland and Norway is for the birds", he says. "We're the fifth or sixth biggest economy in the whole world. Now we can do a much better, we can have a much better deal than anyone else. Then we get this little homily:

Last year, we had a balance of trade deficit with the EU of £62 billion, so if people talk about all the jobs they rely on trade from the EU in this country, there are lots of jobs reliant of that. We're not going to stop that. But how many more jobs in the EU are dependent on trade with us. So Germany is never going to give up trade in BMWs and Mercedes into the UK, so we can negotiate a very good deal for ourselves in terms of trade from outside of the EU, because they need us more than we need them.

This is truly in Ukip "nutjob" territory. Apart from the fact that our deficit looks very different when services are taken into account, there is a huge fallacy in Mr Davies's case. The point, of course, is that, while we don't need to be in the EU to export to EU countries, the UK doesn't need to be in the EU for EU countries to export to us.

Thus, the EU Member States know full well that, should we leave the EU, they will continue to sell goods to us. Furthermore, under WTO rules, we can neither impose significant (and in many cases any) tariffs, nor discriminate against their products. Mr Davies might just care to look up the principle of "National Treatment" in this respect.

The idea, thus, that we have any special leverage in negotiations with the EU is utterly flawed. But, even if it wasn't, the prospect of the UK negotiating a better trading deal with the EU once having withdrawn, than it could as a Member State, is a fantasy. We would struggle to agree a bespoke agreement less than ten years, but it would be a poor deal. Crucially, the EU knows that to offer preferential terms to an outsider would create huge internal stresses, sufficient to threaten the very survival of the Union. It could not and will never happen. 

Unsurprisingly, the point be Davies is easily batted away by Sandys as "not a very robust argument". That allows her to return to the "influence" meme, her zombie still alive and kicking as she gravely tells us it is "absolutely crucial" that our businesses have a say over the sorts of terms and agreements that they will trade with "Europe".

By now, we're only halfway into this debate, although it feels much longer. And already I'm beginning to lose the will to live. Davies has done the unforgivable – he has descended into the weeds, to trade blow for blow. Thus the debate rests on "he says-she says" exchanges that will bore the pants off casual viewers. As the referendum campaign develops, we will see new records for the speed with which millions of remote buttons are pressed.

With the trade issue completely unresolved, and no winner on either side (which give the status quo the game), Neil moves on to migration. Again he calls in aid Switzerland, which "pretty much has open borders with the EU". The EU, says Neil, would require the same of us, even once we had left.

This is a reasonable point, in general, but badly made in respect of Switzerland, which is undergoing a crisis in its relations with the EU after the referendum on immigration, February year last. And Switzerland's plight is very relevant to the debate, but not only is it omitted by Neil, it is not raised by either Davies or Sandys.

Davies simply reiterates that he thinks we could do better than Switzerland, notwithstanding that Switzerland is trying and failing to do better than Switzerland. And anyone following the argument al;ready knows that the EU has repeatedly emphasised that the principle of free movement is not negotiable. A tiresome rant on immigration then terminates in the Ukip mantra that, we need to leave the EU to control our borders.

Sandys manages a damaging jibe calling the Swiss and Norwegian options, the "twilight zone", pointing out the obvious flaws in the Davis position, trading blows as good as she gets – another no-score draw. "The EU will not allow us to have access to the Single Market without free movement of labour", Sandys declares triumphantly.

Little does she realise it, but she has not only given Davies a free kick at the goal, but she's walked off the pitch. Free movement of labour is precisely what we want to return to, scaling down from the free movement of people – which includes relatives and dependants, and all sorts of non-economically active incomers. But Davies doesn't recognise the gift, and returns to his mantra about Germany wanting to sell us BMWs and Mercedes.

There's three minutes left to run, and we're back on the biff-bam on trade, and they've all lost it - all of them, including Neil. Like a toothache, I just want it to be over. And if this is what the debate is going to be like, it is going to be a very long two years. A taste of things to come, Neil called it. If that's the case, God help us.