It is a fact curiously overlooked by many Conservatives today that Margaret Thatcher did more than almost any European leader to embed the free movement of people across the continent.

In 1988 she told British business to seize the opportunity of a Single Market with ‘direct and unhindered access’ to more than 300 million consumers – underpinned by the four freedoms of goods, services, capital and people. To Mrs Thatcher, and to Lord Cockfield, its great architect, the project was a machine for competition, growth and enterprise.

That view was not shared by much of the old Labour movement. For many trade unionists, the Common Market looked like a bosses’ project: a way of exposing British workers to the relentless march of multinational capital.

On factory floors, the EEC was dismissed as a ‘rich man’s club’. Frances O’Grady later recalled that her father, a Cowley shop steward, carried a sticker with that slogan on his moped because he did not believe what was good for business automatically trickled down to workers. Dennis Skinner concluded that the market was ‘deliberately designed… to transfer cheap labour across national borders.’

The pivot came in 1988, when Jacques Delors told the TUC that ‘no one ever fell in love with a market.’ His offer was twofold: accept the market, and Europe would wrap it in a social settlement of workers’ rights, public services and collective bargaining.

But by the time of the 2016 referendum, the polarity had flipped once........

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