The EU has given us cheap mobile phone roaming charges, cheaper flights and proper compensation when things go wrong. It has helped clean up the environment, improving our rivers and beaches. It has given us unprecedented freedom to travel visa-free across the continent. And I’m voting out.

Why? I know a painter/decorator who has not been able to raise his wages for 15 years. There’s always someone else, he says, willing to work for less. A driver who arrived from Turkey 18 years ago, who says the bus companies used to pay more than £12 an hour, but can now pay £10 or less because they have so many takers (and yes, the irony is noted). A care-home cleaner in a rundown seaside town who reckons her hopes of ever getting more than the minimum wage are zero. Each blames an influx of workers from the EU. Each of them are voting out. Tell them the EU protects workers’ rights and they just laugh.

When companies launch recruitment drives in eastern Europe they blame skills shortages in Britain. Really? If a big business wants to hire, say, drivers on £25 an hour, it will find it can do so easily; what they really mean is that they can’t find people willing to work for £10 an hour or less, with antisocial hours to boot. Meanwhile, workers here rejecting low wages are told they are lazy, chavvy and feckless when they refuse to be part of the so-called “jobs factory of Europe”.

Meanwhile, as wages for people in low-income groups are pegged back, rents rise. Many times I interviewed Britain’s biggest buy-to-let landlord, Fergus Wilson, and many times he told me how well he was doing from eastern European migrants, who filled nearly all his properties and kept his rental income booming.

Rents in parts of the country are at catastrophic levels, snatching as much as 60% of pay. Migration is only part of the reason why that is happening. But when George Osborne declares house prices will fall by 18% if Britain quits, he’s giving the game away. He is saying membership of the EU keeps prices and rents much higher than they would otherwise be. Young people struggling with ludicrous rents, take note.

Much of the rebellion against the EU is from the left-behinds, the victims of globalisation, sticking two fingers up against the establishment, muddled though their reasons may be. If Britain leaves as a consequence, Brussels should not seek to punish them. These voices can be heard in many other parts of Europe. Reading El Pais this week, I was struck by below-the-line comments furious at depressed wages and immigration. You hear similar statements, and rather more ugly, in Denmark and Holland. Austria narrowly avoided electing a far-right president. The left everywhere rightly trembles at the thought of a Le Pen victory in France.

But, while condemning, the left should seek to understand why the right has gained such ground. Yvette Cooper’s call this week for “controls and brakes” to manage economic migration has been widely mocked as an 11th-hour conversion. But whether Britain quits or not, the institutions of the EU need to take a serious look at labour rules, and why so many Europeans think Brussels panders to the interests of big corporates rather than working people.

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Jeremy Corbyn has declared himself only 75% “in”. If only more politicians could be similarly nuanced. I’m around 60% out, 40% in, and annoyed like so many others about how the campaign on both sides has become so extreme. If we do vote to remain (which I think is the most likely outcome), my reaction will be little more than a shrug. There is much to like about the EU, but my feeling is that Brussels will only be jolted into serious reform by a shock event such as Brexit.

You can’t divorce and keep the benefits of marriage, say the remain camp. But the EU was never a marriage. We’re more like flatmates who recently haven’t been getting along too well. But we can still get back together, even if one of us flounces off to the parents for a bit after a bust-up.

Yes, there is uncertainty, but democracy is a messy business. If the risk is that wages may stabilise in places, if the risk is that rents may fall – then they are risks I’m happy to take.