Continental drift | 2 June 2016

It is a long time since the term ‘sick man of Europe’ could be applied to Britain. France is now a worthier candidate for the accolade — it -increasingly resembles a tribute act to 1970s Britain. A package of modest labour-market reforms presented by a socialist president has provoked national strikes on the railways and Air France. This week, the streets of Paris resembled one big Grunwick or Saltley Gate — the trials of strength between employer and union in which so many of Britain’s most bolshy trade unionists cut their teeth. This week is not a one-off: in recent years France has had a strike rate more than twice that of Denmark, its nearest European competitor.

Britain now looks a paradigm of -industrial virtue by comparison. We have far fewer strikes and on many other economic measures — with the disturbing exception of the public deficit — Britain consistently performs among the best EU nations. Our economic growth is set to be the best in -western Europe; our unemployment rate is half that of France and Italy and a quarter of that in Spain.

It is remarkable that Britain’s relative economic performance has not featured more in the EU referendum debate. In 1975, when we last had such a referendum, the Remain campaign (or Yes campaign as it then was, owing to the different wording of the question) could make a powerful case that Britain had much to learn from its European neighbours when it came to running a modern economy. Many Tories agreed, and Margaret Thatcher famously pulled on a sweater showing the flags of Common Market countries. A vote for Europe was a vote to discard the broken British economic model and join the powerhouses of the Continent.

Now the tables have turned, and it is pertinent to ask: why do we set so much store by selling to the stagnant economies of mainland Europe? Is such parochialism appropriate in an era of global free trade? If we want to learn anything now, we should be looking to the US, Canada and Singapore.