If we weren’t already in, we’d never join this chaotic club

So desperately do we need some wider perspective on this claustrophobic referendum campaign that we might reflect on what would be the likely outcome if, instead of being asked to remain or leave the EU, we were voting on whether to join it in the first place.

Back in 1975, when inflation was running at 27 per cent and our economy was such a basket case that Britain was being dubbed “the sick man of Europe”, it was plausible that we should wish to remain safely locked into what most people thought was just a rather successful trading arrangement, a Common Market.

But if we weren’t already in it today, is it conceivable that we would now wish to join the European Union as it has become? What a sad place it now looks. We see it hopelessly embroiled in that seemingly insoluble crisis brought on it by its hubristic gamble over the euro. We see the chaos into which it has been plunged by its equally reckless “open borders” policy, faced with that uncontrollable flood of migrants, not only from outside Europe but within it. All over the EU we see angry people flocking to join “antiBrussels” parties.

The “European project” presents a very much less attractive spectacle today than at any time before in its 60-year history. A vote on whether the British wished to join such a dismal enterprise would bring an overwhelming “No”.

Instead of which we have yet again reduced our national debate to endless footling speculation about what might or might not happen in some hypothetical future, which cannot be proved right or wrong. David Cameron’s Project Fear campaign has gone quite selfparodyingly over the top in conjuring up every kind of unimaginable disaster if we were to leave. He doesn’t even try to offer any positive vision of why belonging to the EU is such a wonderfully effective way for Britain to be governed.

The Leave campaign seems stuck with little more than its pretence that we could somehow spend an additional £350 million a week on the NHS, despite this having been comprehensively discredited a dozen times over. Even more disastrously it deliberately refuses to accept that we should remain in the Single Market, although this would be quite possible with an intelligent exit plan – leaving a black hole at the heart of its argument which plays straight into the hands of Project Fear.

There has been no more damning comment on the low-grade fatuity of this debate than the recent report by the Commons Treasury Committee which, after interrogating spokesmen for the two sides, could not have been more contemptuous of the equally bogus claims each had been making. It might have summed up what all the official campaigners were saying in those words of Hamlet to Ophelia, “we are arrant knaves all; believe none of us”.

Altogether, recent weeks have brought home the lamentable state to which 43 years in “Europe” have reduced the level of public debate in this country, where our politicians on both sides, let alone the public, scarcely seem to understand even the simplest facts about the system of government we now live under.

As Pitt the Younger famously remarked after Trafalgar, “we have saved ourselves by our exertions and we shall save Europe by our example”. Whether we know how to save ourselves any longer is a moot point. “Europe” itself, run by a bunch of dingy nonentities scarcely any of us even know the names of, and seemingly quite incapable of dealing with any of the crises piling in on them from all sides, may be beyond saving.

But at least we can step back on June 23 and ask whether this European Union is really still a club of which we would be wise to remain a member. In a few years time, as the eurozone surges on to that treaty which will lock it into much closer political union, the EU is going to look very different from the one we see today, and not for the better; not least if it consigns Britain and the other non-euro countries to the status of “associate” or second-class members. Shall we be able to look back then and say that at least we made the right choice in 2016? Sir John Major once claimed that a benefit of being in Europe was that ‘we can listen to the music of Bellini, Wagner and Mozart’ Europhiles led by Tony Blair, Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke gathered in a gloomy south London cinema to launch a campaign to educate the British people on “the benefits of Britain being in Europe” (their list of 20 benefits included “improved fencing for farms in Northern Ireland”).

Not wishing to be outshone by these luminaries, Major told the BBC that another benefit of being in Europe was that “we can listen to the music of Bellini, Wagner and Mozart”. None of us were previously aware that before joining the Common Market these delights had been denied to us. But for my own taste, if leaving the EU meant that we could no longer listen to Wagner, I would not be too disappointed.