A world of opportunity is waiting for a fully independent Britain

The Remainers have sought to scare the nation into believing that calamity lies in wait for an independent Britain. They imply that our trade would collapse even though we import far more from the EU than they buy from us and our biggest markets are outside the EU.

We are told membership is essential because it provides access to a market of 500 million people; yet there is a market of six billion people beyond its borders and nothing would stop us continuing to trade with Europe anyway. Other non-EU countries trade more with the single market than we do but don’t have to pay into the EU budget for the privilege of doing so.

A world of opportunity is waiting for a fully independent Britain. This country is a leading economic power, its language is global, its laws are trusted and its reputation for fair dealing is second to none. To say we cannot thrive free of the EU’s constraints is defeatist and flies in the face of this country’s great mercantile traditions.

But while the economic rationale for membership was the key argument behind the movement to take us into the Common Market, there were other motivations, too. After the Second World War and the end of Britain’s role as a colonial power, the country was politically and diplomatically adrift. Its predicament was summed up by the US secretary of state Dean Acheson with the phrase: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.”

In the early 1960s, the Macmillan government thought to plug that gap by joining what was then a community of six countries, but his overtures were rebuffed by the French president Charles de Gaulle. Our eventual accession, together with Ireland and Denmark, increased the number to nine. Today there are 28. So how do we answer the question implied in that editorial 43 years ago? Can history regard it as a “sunshine day”?

Within a few years of joining, our ambivalence to Europe was already apparent when the Labour government, for internal political reasons, called a referendum on our continued membership in 1975. The result was an overwhelming vote to remain – by 2:1 – and this seemed to put paid to any lingering doubts. The country wanted to stay; so let’s get on with it.

Few people, however, fully appreciated the extent to which the EEC was less the benign economic arrangement they imagined and much more a political project. True, there were those during the 1975 referendum campaign who made this point; but they went largely unheeded. The national sense was that we were in a free trading area of independent nation states that would help our exporters, create jobs and allow everyone to get richer.

There were early difficulties, not least British objections to the terms on which we joined, which Mrs Thatcher sought to rectify by demanding and securing a rebate on the UK’s excessive contribution. But, by and large, the relationship worked well. If anything, the British took the lead in seeking to turn the EU into a proper trading area by championing the single market, even if Mrs Thatcher later regretted the way this was done.

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Everything changed in 1992, however, with the Maastricht Treaty. Now, the political nature of the project took over. The Common Market became the European Union and its people citizens of the EU; timetables were set for economic and monetary union and the introduction of a single currency; areas of policy-making that had previously been agreed among member states were brought within the competence of the European Commission, which became a supercharged administration-cum-government.

We did not like this development but were not given the opportunity to stop it. John Major, then prime minister, obtained an opt-out from the single currency. But it went ahead with all the safeguards to prevent economic disparities abandoned, with disastrous consequences.

Subsequent treaties signed at Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, together with a string of political protocols, have further aggrandised the EU into a supra-national body within which the interests of individual states are secondary to the greater good of the overall Union.

It now has the trappings of the nation state that we were always assured it would not become: a single currency; a central bank; no frontiers (even if these have been going up again recently in response to the migration crisis); a supreme court; a police force and judicial system (Europol and Eurojust); an embryonic gendarmerie; its own foreign policy; and, if some in the Commission get their way, it will have a European army.

Nor will it stop there. The report of the EU’s Five Presidents published last year in response to the eurozone’s deep problems charts the way forward to a fully integrated EU, a superstate in all but name. The fact that Britain does not participate in some of its component parts, notably the euro or the borderless Schengen area, makes no difference since they have an impact upon us.

It is suggested by those wanting to stay in the EU that this somehow gives us “the best of both worlds”. In truth it gives us the worst of a bad job: half in and half out of something we do not really wish to be part of but feel we cannot leave for fear of wrecking it.

Indeed, so fragile is this political construct that the departure of one of its members, and especially one as big as the UK, threatens to trigger terminal instability. And why is that? If this were a robust democratic institution, underpinned by a thriving economy and a content and happy citizenry then Britain’s withdrawal should have no impact at all. Of course, if it were such a utopia then we wouldn’t be having a discussion about leaving in the first place; but it isn’t.

Across Europe, disenchantment with Brussels is growing. A recent poll in Italy showed 48 per cent would vote to leave, an astonishing figure in the spiritual home of the EU. The MORI poll also suggested that 58 per cent of the French want their own referendum, and 41 per cent say they would vote to leave. Those who dismiss the referendum here as some British eccentricity whipped up by Little Englander Europhobes need to ask why the EU is so unpopular elsewhere.

The principal reason is its anti-democratic nature – the dislocation between those who govern and the governed. While people can vote for their national leaders, who then have an input into collective decision-making, they are no longer able to influence events that affect them directly through the ballot box. In any case, by the time many directives that begin life in Brussels have got to the Council of Ministers for a decision it is too late to stop them.

So we are not alone in Britain in feeling irritation with the EU. Most pernicious has been the way in which it has imposed its will on democratically elected governments in indebted eurozone countries in order to bail them out of the economic difficulties brought about by their membership of the single currency. The fact that the EU is a collection of democracies does not detract from the reality that this is a profoundly undemocratic institution. This has nothing to do with being anti-European. It is about the type of institution the EU has become.

The question that arises, therefore, is whether we wish to stay in a club whose rules and membership have changed so markedly since we joined 43 years ago and which no longer delivers the benefits we were promised at the outset.

We are not harking back to a golden age lost in the mists of time but looking forward to a new beginning for our country