Flights to Australia have been around for almost as long as commercial air travel itself. But they used to be unbelievably tedious and expensive affairs. A trip from London to Brisbane in the 1930s involved 24 fuel stops and took 11 days. A return ticket cost the then-astronomical sum of £13,000.

On Monday, I made the journey to Australia in a single leg, flying directly from London to Perth on Qantas’s new route. That shrinkage of time - 11 days to 17 hours - is one answer to those who, even now, insist that Britain’s commercial and diplomatic energies should be focused on Europe.

Europhiles tend to belittle trade with distant lands. Australia, they scoff, is our 16th export destination, behind Germany, France, Italy and Spain. But they are begging the question. Of course EU countries are our major trading partners: since 1973, we have been in a customs union with them, specifically designed to redirect our trade toward the Continent. That reorientation, as an LSE study showed, had an impact on our internal economic geography. Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol found themselves, as it were, on the wrong side of the country; wealth and population shifted to the South East.

I’m not sure it ever made sense to abandon a global trading system – a diverse grouping of agrarian, commodity, manufacturing and service-based economies linked by the common law and the English language – for a bloc of homogenous European economies. The purpose of trade, after all, is to swap on the back of differences. But whether or not it made sense in 1973, it plainly makes little sense today. Over the past half century, freight and refrigeration costs have tumbled, flights have become cheaper and more comfortable and the internet has revolutionised communications. At the same time, the Commonwealth has surged economically: its combined economy surpassed that of the eurozone in 2012 and will overtake the EU as a whole next year.