What do the polls really tell us? At the heart of the European project was a certain set of assumptions about the relationship between politics and economics, which may be beginning to fall apart. It was assumed that a single free-market economy could work across the whole continent without having one central government in charge. Behind this lay the belief that markets worked best when governments had least to do with them. This was the neo-liberal doctrine – somewhat called into question by what happened in 2008 – that free markets were efficient, self-regulating and self-correcting. That assumption also applied to the labour market; hence the free movement of labour became a core principle of the whole project. This model still left room for regulations, to be applied consi