“Climb the giant beef mountain… bathe in the nourishing wine lake… visit the Palace of Bureaucrats!” This “special holiday offer” for a tour of the follies of Europe’s common agricultural policy ran on the front of an anti-Brussels leaflet published ahead of the UK’s referendum in 1975 by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW). The AUEW and its allies argued that the European Community was a capitalist club whose governments bought up and destroyed food to raise prices for “housewives” while benefiting the “owners of the means of production,” like farmers. This was, in fact, correct – except for the capitalist part.

It went beyond food, however. Britain’s old socialists wanted to stop the development of a common market in Europe in order to keep capital locked in the UK. “The bankers and financiers want us [in the EU] so that they can shift their investment across the Channel, putting people out of work here,” stated another anti-EU leaflet, one of many now housed in the voluminous archives of the London School of Economics.

Much of the Left has now abandoned its hostility to the EU. But many of these protectionist instincts have re-emerged in the European referendum campaign, this time on the right. Yesterday, the Electoral Commission gave official designation to one of the two “No” campaigns, making it eligible for funding. The two No campaigns have offered radically different visions of what Britain would be like outside the EU. One is isolationist. If we do vote to leave in June, it is important that this vision doesn’t win.