Britain left the European Union on 31 January 2020. The time since has not seen the country gambolling across sunny uplands, and many have come to the conclusion – reluctantly or otherwise – that Brexit simply isn’t working. Last month, even Nigel Farage himself joined in: ‘Brexit has failed,’ he proclaimed (though it wasn’t his fault).

Is this a fair judgement? Or is it too early to tell yet?

Let’s cast our minds back to when we first joined the European Communities, just over 50 years ago on 1 January 1973. Britain was not then in a good state. The previous year had seen 2,500 strikes, with 24 million workdays lost to industrial action. Much of that – over 10 million lost days – was the consequence of the first national miners’ strike since the war.

Elsewhere, Bank of England interest rates stood at 9 per cent, unemployment at 4 per cent, inflation at 7.65 per cent. The one piece of good economic news was almost too good: in the final quarter of 1972, GDP grew by 1.8 per cent.

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Flip forward to May 1976. We had then been in the EC for three years and five months, the same amount of time that we have now been out. How was the nation faring in this exciting new world?

The good news was that it seemed we were getting on top of industrial relations. There were still a lot of strikes – over 2,000 that year – but the disruption was much reduced, with the loss of just 3.3 million workdays.

Everything else was much worse. Interest rates and unemployment were up to 11.5 and 5.4 per cent respectively that May, and inflation had doubled to 15.4 per cent. The second quarter of 1976 saw GDP fall by 0.9 per cent.

Also in the news in May 1976, Professor Stephen Haseler was attracting attention with his book The Death of British Democracy; Bert Hazell, president of the agricultural workers’ union, was warning that once the transition into the common agricultural policy was completed, food prices were going to rise still further; and the BBC science programme Horizon was examining the global climate, warning that drought threatened ‘a crisis which may well dwarf our economic problems’.

Oh, and the recently departed prime minister Harold Wilson, the man who’d called a referendum on British membership of the EC, published his resignation honours list – the so-called Lavender List – rewarding his dodgy cronies and causing a storm of controversy.

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Would it have been reasonable to look at the state of the nation and to declare that EC membership was a failure?

Obviously not. There were a host of other factors in those years that had a negative impact, from international developments – the oil-price crisis of late 1973 – to the incompetence of domestic politicians, notably chancellor Anthony Barber, who’d left office in February 1974 but whose toxic legacy of inflation and recession was still being felt. So, pretty much the same as now, with the gas-price crisis, covid and an incompetent Tory government.

It surely would have been absurd in May 1976 to conclude that Europe wasn’t working, that Europe had failed. Is the same not true today?

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