If the Common Market was good, the single market must be better, right? Wrong. It is the most misleading piece of conventional unwisdom in this EU debate.

There is no doubt that entry into the Common Market was beneficial for Britain in 1973 but for the past two decades or so our performance has been no better, and sometimes even slightly worse, than our non-EU competitors.

When in 1992 the EU started to create the single market, it required all EU nations to accept decisions on trade matters by majority voting, so Britain had no veto. Big European companies seized on the nature of the single market as a way of protecting their own. Instead of promoting mutual recognition, of regulation, standards and health and