So the economic disadvantages of EEC (EU) membership were identified from the very start.
And it was invaluable in encouraging democracy in later adherents, especially that trio of Mediterranean countries with wobbly parliamentary traditions: Greece, Spain and Portugal.As for economics, by dismantling trade barriers within Europe the EEC no less hugely boosted prosperity.
Ireland, for example, has a birth rate of 21.5 per 1,000, twice the EEC average.
It hopes, for example, to make the EEC a true common market by 1992.
Ever since it joined what was then the EEC in 1973, Britain has fashioned Europe in its own image.
Though an ardent enthusiast for Europe in principle, his stint as an EEC commissioner in 1970-73 left him appalled by the "perniciousness" of its bureaucracy.
It had to look for other ways of getting access to Europe's huge market without the political obligations of EEC membership.
Algeria left the forerunner of the EEC when it became independent in 1962; the 56,000 residents of Greenland departed in 1985; the French Caribbean colony of Saint Barthelemy (which, with nearly 10,000 inhabitants, has as roughly the same population as Glastonbury, in Somerset) formally exited the EU in 2012.
For a start, Britain was then trying to negotiate its way into the EEC.
Davis said Cameron should have followed the example of the late Labour prime minister Harold Wilson who allowed cabinet ministers to remain in their posts while campaigning on either side in the 1975 referendum on Britain's EEC membership.
John Mills, who was the national director of the no campaign in the 1975 EEC referendum, said: "I think she is a very strong, feisty figure.
