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The remaining nations may be taking a hard line as they worry early talks would allow the British to sow divisions among the 27 by meeting with individual governments, according to Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform.

For the foreseeable future, GDP per person in places like India and China will be lower than the EU’s, points out John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank. It will be many years before these countries’ citizens are rich enough to demand the same sorts of goods and services from Britain as the EU does.

Camino Mortera-Martinez, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, described the question as "absolutely biased" and pointed to its loaded language. "The way the question has been put to the people, I think Orban is likely to win," she said.

"People find ways around barriers," says Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think-tank. "Unless you start making them particularly inhumane, people are going to find other ways of getting through the system."

On no issue is this state of limbo more dangerous than migration. With civil wars still raging in the Middle East, any number of sparks could see the crisis flare up again with startling intensity. “There is a sense of calm before the storm,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, a research fellow and expert on free movement at the Centre of European Reform, a think-tank. As it stands, she told TWW, the bloc would be ill-equipped to withstand such an eventuality. The current solutions, though hard-fought, are sticking plasters; the serious treatment is yet to come.

Our fortune in the west may be indisputable, but is often little comfort to the many Brits who – by western European standards – are stuck in an economic rut. Stark figures were published this week from the Centre for European Reform. London and the south east are the only UK regions with a higher-than-average GDP per capita, compared to 15 major EU countries. All other parts of the UK (accounting for three quarters of the population) have GDP-per-head below 90 per cent of the EU-15 average.

It was, for example, often repeated by Boris Johnson in the EU referendum campaign that Britain’s economic performance had for the last 15 years been much better than that of the rest of the EU. But Simon Tilford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, alleges that, on the contrary, Britain is in many ways the poor man of Europe. 
 

As Christian Odendahl, an economist with the Centre for European Reform in London, points out, a bailout with taxpayers’ money would give AfD yet another stick with which to beat her, on top of her bailouts of feckless Mediterranean types and her handling of the migrant crisis.