Eurosceptics have long followed the policy of Goebbels who said that if you tell a lie often enough people will believe it. One particularly insidious lie that they have been repeating since the 1970s is a fabricated quote from Jean Monnet to the effect that:

"Europe's nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation."

Anyone with a passing acquaintance of Monnet's work would immediately be suspicious of such a quote. I have asked the Jean Monnet foundation in Switzerland whether there is any record of Jean Monnet saying anything of the sort, and they confirm that he didn't - this was an invention first made up in a British newspaper in the 1970s.

On the other hand, they have sent me a real speech by Jean Monnet, delivered on the 28th March 1953 to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, in which he said precisely the opposite -

"Our Community will only develop well if all the measures that it takes are made public, explained publicly not only to the peoples of our Community but also to those who do not belong to it"

[The French original - "Notre Communauté ne se développera bien que si toutes les mesures qu'elle prend sont rendues publiques, expliquées publiquement, non suelement aux peuples de notre Communauté, mais aux peoples qui n'en font pas partie."]