A few years ago I shared a platform with my old friend Lord Lawson at a conference on our membership of the European Union. This was some time before the infamous referendum. The event was good-tempered, and it will come as no surprise to readers that Lawson was, in a term yet to be coined, a “Leaver”, and your correspondent was not.

What surprised me over subsequent coffee and drinks was the number of successful, and obviously intelligent, people in the audience who thanked Lawson and me for having covered the history of the EU. It turned out some of the audience had only the vaguest idea why, to use the original title, the European Economic Community was set up in the first place.

Decades have passed since the foundation of a group of nations that were bound together in the hope that, after centuries of conflict, they should not go to war among themselves again. And, of course, the “community” has evolved into (at present) 28 nations.

Although, as an economics commentator, I concentrate principally on the needless economic harm threatened by Brexit – indeed, it is already happening – I nevertheless find it baffling that politicians as intelligent and experienced as Lawson should want to risk disrupting a Europe that is faced by such large and powerful global forces as those reigned over by presidents Vladimir Putin on one side and Donald Trump on the other.

When it comes to the economic debate, Lawson placed hopes then – as others, such as the Brexit secretary David Davis, do now – on the prospect of some magical transformation of our commercial prospects. This would come about by abandoning membership of the vast and highly beneficial European customs union and single market, and arranging trade deals with the likes of Trump. Can this be the same Trump whose regime wanted to impose penal tariffs of 300% on imports of Bombardier’s C-Series aircraft?

This smacks more of a trade war than a trade “deal”. It is hoped that Airbus will come to the rescue – in his memoirs, Kenneth Clarke hails Airbus as a wonderful example of cooperation within the EU to create a rival to Boeing, and confesses that he was wrong to oppose it at first.

It puzzles some people why Nigel Lawson should be so anti-European when he spent much of his time as chancellor (1983-89) in a succession of abortive attempts to persuade Margaret Thatcher to agree to putting the pound into the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM).

Of course, when, after Lawson’s resignation in disgust, Thatcher was finally worn down by the fashionable establishment view at the time, our brief membership of the ERM– 1990 to 1992 – ended in political disaster for what was by then the Major government. Unfortunately it emboldened the eurosceptics in the Conservative party – or “septics”, as Sir Edward Heath liked to call them – and they nagged away until they got their referendum.

However, it was for counter-inflationary, not pro-European, reasons that Lawson preached the virtues of entry to the ERM. Monetarism had proved a dismal failure, and he hoped that an ERM dominated by the Deutschmark would offer a safer counter-inflationary anchor.

So what have Lawson and his fellow Brexiters (I have decided that the extra “e” in Brexiteers makes the unruly gang sound far too romantic) achieved? Yes, the 15% devaluation the financial markets have imposed on the UK – in wise anticipation of economic disruption to come – has produced an outburst of, ironically, Lawson’s old enemy: inflation.

Chancellor Philip Hammond at an OECD press conference. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

The impact of rising prices is everywhere in the shops. The familiar squeeze on real incomes has become more pronounced. The governor of the Bank of England drops stronger and stronger hints that, in the face of referendum-induced inflation, monetary policy is going to be tightened. The justification is an acceleration of inflation in an atmosphere of near-full employment. But, thanks to a sequence of events – the weakening of the unions, the competitive forces of globalisation, the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the counter-productive policy of austerity – having a job no longer cushions millions of people against hardship or outright poverty. The daily news about personal indebtedness illustrates this. Higher interest rates can only aggravate such problems.

Against this background Lawson recently chose to refer to the current Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond, as being “very close” to a saboteur in refusing to spend more in preparation for a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit. He even urged Theresa May to sack Hammond – not a very nice attitude to adopt towards a successor.

At all events, those of us who refuse to accept Brexit should be heartened. The referendum was conducted on false pretences. Recent polls suggest that, as the costs of departure become apparent, people are waking up to the implications of Brexit. A YouGov poll for the Times showed 42% for Leave, outnumbered by 47% for Remain.

We live in a representative democracy. From the moment a general election result is known, the opposition begins the fightback. Nigel Farage said on referendum night that he would not accept a close Remain result. The fightback is now well under way, and the absurdity of Brexit becomes more evident by the day.

The main economic reason for our joining the EU was to improve our economic performance. The International Monetary Fund, the OECD and many others are united in saying that Brexit would be deleterious for our economy. Do we really need this self-harm?