Margaret This is what pisses me off, because it looks like Macron might just get it. Yet we are worse affected by this (especially our poor) and they never considered offering us similar. (The break was not comparable to what Macron wants). If the EU had come back and said 'Look, we know we're not so good for the less well off in your country, so we have solutions which can help' and offered similar I may well have voted remain. But they didn't. Because they didn't even want us to stay.
The question here, though, is did any British representative ever approach the EU in a reasonable way and demand viable reform that conformed to original EU founding principles? I am not so sure anyone ever did.
It's like the whole business of Cameron approaching the EU over benefits for recent EU migrants to Britain. Was the problem actually EU directives or the means-tested, non-actuarial nature of the British benefit system (which is unique in Europe)? Did anyone ever make the case that what was happening in Britain contravened the principle of EU citizens not being a burden on a host country's welfare system? I never read any evidence someone made that case to the EU at all or was even honest about it to the public.
In fact, I have always been left with impression that the British governing class really did not give a damn about how the EU's directives collided with British systems to the detriment of certain sections of British citizenry.
As regards the currency, well, it has always seemed a little strange to me that hardly anyone points out the euro is actually a neo-Deutschmark that has been artificially kept low by the inclusion of Club Med countries into the EMU. It's classic Thatcher-era monetarism, where unemployment in one part of the economic entity is the price to be paid for price stability in another, writ large over an entire continent.
Britain was kept out of this purely by virtue of retaining sterling, which, I've got to say, is the best thing Gordon Brown ever did for Britain (despite the fact he screwed up almost everything else) and for this alone, I'd make the argument that guy deserves a statue on a plinth somewhere. 
The fact is that the euro is just too strong for Spain, Italy and Greece (which is what previous posters are actually experiencing when they complain about high prices for food and drink on holidays). And, of course, it is ... because the EMU includes Germany: a large and strong industrial economy, the fourth largest exporting nation in the world behind the US, China, and South Korea, with a governing class that has an obsession with price stability and fear of inflation running through their bone marrow.