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.
On the day the United Kingdom joined the Common Market on Jan 1, 1973, the editorial in this newspaper captured the views of much of the country.