> Many people of that generation say they voted Remain the first time because they were explicitly promised that the EU (or EEC as it was then known) was merely

> Many people of that generation say they voted Remain the first time because they were explicitly promised that the EU (or EEC as it was then known) was merely a free trade zone with no ambitions to be more. This is absolutely not true! I can't believe how many people repeat this. The people who tell you this are either misremembering, or they've fooled themselves into believing it, or they're lying to you. The entire argument against joining the EEC at the time was based on the threat to UK democracy because it was well known the project was a political one, not merely a common market. The leaflet the government sent out to every household in the UK stated this explicitly but chose to reason about why this wasn't a bad thing. Here: https://civitas.org.uk/content/files/1975ReferendumGov.pdf https://civitas.org.uk/content/files/1975ReferendumGov.pdf And there is a lot more material out there with various viewpoints on both sides expressed, almost all of them talking about the political side of the EEC. It's just a nonsense that this wasn't known about.