Monday, 1 January 1973 was one of the best days of my life. I was starting a seventh year of working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the roles I was being given were getting better and better. My wife and I owned our own tiny cottage, our son was in infant school, and we were expecting the birth of a daughter. I had a little secondhand Renault. And this was the day when the UK finally became a member of the European Economic Community.

I grew up in a working-class home in the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire. My father was a commissionaire at a large chemical plant, and my mother worked, as she had all her life, in a heavy-woollen weaving shed. I visited her at work only once, and the experience revolted me: the noise, the polluted air, the two monstrous looms she operated alone. But she loved the social atmosphere of friendship, fun, companionship, trust and hard work. Also she was a member of a community, and that meant everything to her.

My father had been a regular soldier in the British army. His working life was never as good as it had been during his years of service – in 1945, when he was demobbed, he was regimental sergeant major of the Parachute Regiment. He loved that job for the same reasons that my mother loved hers: community.

I was born in 1940, and I like to believe I was conceived the night before my father went to war. Of course, the war did not affect me directly. I slept in a cot beside my mother’s bed, and later shared her bed. It seemed I didn’t have a father, but I was cared for. There were Anderson air-raid shelters in our backyard, though we never had to use them. My mother’s sister, just across the road, had a cellar – stone-built, no windows, no access except down the steep stone stairs – but we went there only one night, and just before we descended my much older brother, who was in the RAF, pointed out flames in the sky where a V2 rocket was heading for Manchester or Liverpool. That was all the war meant to me.

But the years after the war were very different, with shortages of everything, rationing and the black market. And it was then that, little by little, I learned what the war had meant to the adults around me. The loss of loved ones or severely injured family and friends returning home to a very challenging life. Servicemen like my father suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as we now call it, with no medical care to help them. The cost of war was everywhere, and many never recovered from it.

During the years following the war there were shortages of everything, rationing, and the black market

That was the Europe I grew up knowing about. And that is why January 1973, when Britain joined the EEC, was so significant for me. The main aim, as stated in the EEC’s preamble, was “to preserve peace and liberty and to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. Its border stretched from northern West Germany to the toe of Italy, and included most of the territory of Europe over which war had twice raged, only 22 years apart, less than 40 years before. When the UK and Ireland were brought in as members I felt, for the first time in my life, that the brutality of the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 could never happen again, and at last collaborative, collective cooperation would assure benefits for everyone.

Perhaps I had too utopian a vision of what a new Europe might be like. The 1990s wars in the Balkans were a ghastly setback. Nevertheless, the term “European” had come to mean something different, and I was proud to describe myself and my family as British and European citizens. On the front of all our passports the first words read European Union, and then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Brexit will erase the first two words, and I will offer my new blue passport to immigration officials around the world with less pride than I now do.

The first time I was back on the continent after the 2016 referendum, on the busy, colourful streets of Ghent and Bruges, I felt distinctly uncomfortable, bordering on ashamed, that my country was now seeking to unravel all that had been achieved. Especially given that the Brexit campaigners had deceived the British people with their false and deliberately misleading slogans and speeches – £350m a week promised to the National Health Service. Where is the £350m now, with our emergency rooms, hospitals and surgeries in the grip of a crisis unlike anything the NHS has ever experienced?

And it is not money alone that has triggered this crisis: doctors, nurses and staff are quitting, many of them to return to the countries they left to find a better life in the UK. Now we have told them, in effect: “We don’t want you. Go home.” Yet without migrants, the economy of our nation would collapse.

A recent report on the likely impact of Brexit from the London School of Economics has found that all EU countries will lose income after Brexit. The overall GDP fall in the UK is estimated at between £26bn and £55bn, depending on the negotiated settlement. In the most pessimistic scenario, the cost of Brexit could be as high as £6,400 for each household.

So I want to urge that we think again, now that we are learning the real cost of Brexit. Why is the government still not providing reliable economic surveys about the effects on every sector? This information should be openly revealed to both Houses of Parliament and to the citizens of the UK. Then, and only then, can an informed and truly democratic choice be made.

According to some predictions, it will be at least 20 years before the UK economy stabilises after Brexit. Millions of people my age will be saying to themselves, “Well, that will not be in my lifetime.”

• Patrick Stewart is a British actor