Europhile who best analysed the choices before us

Oddly enough, the shrewdest summary of the real choice facing us on Thursday came from that great Europhile Roy Jenkins. This is what he said in a speech back in 1999: “There are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully, and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and to gain as much benefit as possible from the inside. The other is to recognise that Britain’s history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be other than a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member; and that it would be better, and certainly produce less friction, to accept this, and to move towards an orderly and if possible reasonably amicable withdrawal.”

Even more obviously than when Jenkins spoke those words, there is no way Britain could ever now accept his first option and go wholeheartedly into making Europe work. Apart from anything else, the next great landmark in the EU’s evolution in a year or two’s time will be discussing a new treaty to give much greater political unity to the eurozone countries. This will not directly involve us, as it will leave non-euro countries on the outside as “associate members”.

So the only “coherent alternative”, as Jenkins put it, is that Britain should work for an “orderly and if possible reasonably amicable withdrawal”. Otherwise, if we vote to remain in an EU about to embark on yet another major leap forward to integration, we shall more than ever be doomed to remain as just a “footdragging, constantly complaining member”. And we will still be ruled by a wholly unaccountable system of government that was never intended to be democratic, which most people scarcely begin to understand, and which is widely viewed, not just in Britain but across Europe, with ever-greater suspicion, resentment and hostility.

If we choose to remain, that is what we shall be voting for. We sometimes tend to forget that we live in what, for 1,000 years, has been one of the most extraordinary, wonderful, inspiring countries in all human history. Certainly to negotiate an orderly and amicable withdrawal would be difficult. But that is the only course we will not in the end live to regret. Flying the flag for Leave: the flotilla of small trawlers, joined by the boat of Ukip leader Nigel Farage, passes in front of the Palace of Westminster on Wednesday