Now we see the EU for what it is: secretive, anti-democratic and alien. Those who love Europe should oppose it.

By Ian Dunt

I'm Eurosceptic, not Europhobic. I don't see how the other side managed to claim the word Europhile. Just because they love the EU certainly doesn't mean they love Europe.

I'm Eurosceptic, and a Europhile. I'm in love with the place. After university, I went travelling around the continent for a year. I started in Calais, and made it to Beirut (I overshot a little) before flying home. I am a proud European. I don't care what the name of my currency is, I don't care about the metric martyrs. You can weigh my vegetables in some newfound alien unit system, but as long as I get what I pay for I'll be indifferent.

I'm not a man of the right. I'm not a nationalist, or a xenophobe, or inward-looking. I'm mixed race, forward-looking, liberal and internationalist.

But surely today of all days, as the skies cracked open over Britain when the EU presidency was filled, we have to take a good hard look at what we're getting into in Europe.

An unelected British politician, put forward by an unelected prime minister, as a result of a treaty this country has never had a referendum on, has now been chosen to lead a Union we haven't voted for in a generation. And we're the lucky ones - we're supposed to celebrate that a Brit found a top job. In the EU, even the supposed winners have no power.

And how was it decided? Through political machinations at a secret dinner in Brussels. At last we see the face of the Europe our rulers wish to create: secretive, powerful, detached, alien and oblique.

There is a simple premise to the control of political power that we'd do well to remember right now. We must have democratic control over the authority that rules us. It is a basic ethical principle of political philosophy. If a power acts on me - say a law against robbery, or dropping litter - I must have a say over the creation of the law and how it is policed. The only thing that separates the rule of law from tyranny is the right of the public to control how authorities exercise power.

In Britain, we do this primarily by electing representatives to the legislature and the executive. It's not perfect. Right now it's very far away from perfect, but it's surely better than what we're being presented with in Brussels.

I don't oppose the EU because I'm a little Englander. I oppose it because I believe in the progressive principles of accountability, transparency and, most importantly, suspicion of an over-powerful state. We should be dragging power down to the local level, so that each time someone is prevented from doing something - swimming in the lake, say - they had the opportunity to be part of the group which formulated the rule. The EU moves us in precisely the opposite direction. It centralises power, away from the local area, away even from the national parliament, to a pan-continental organisation with no clear political remit.

And now we see where it takes us. The people of Europe have been disenfranchised. Our rulers make decisions on our behalf, pretending they have the right through the fact each country elected them. They have precious little reason to follow that argument to its conclusion. Brown was never elected. Even newly-elected Merkel only saw her centre-right group win 37.8 per cent of the vote. Is that a mandate now?

The EU is good for three things: business, political power and the status quo.

It's good for business because of the open market. It's good for political power because it spreads citizens over such a vast geographic area, and across so many cultural and linguistic divides, that they cannot rebel against it effectively in the way the public of one national state can. And it is good for the status quo because it stretches out, complicates and covers up the decision-making process, making all change proceed at an unbearably slow pace.

It is not good for the people of Europe. The leaders of the EU don't care. They claim nothing has been done to devalue the nation state but that is merely proof that some people will argue anything, regardless of the visible truth in front of their faces. We are now being represented on the international stage by people we did not elect, following a treaty we weren't given a say over. Their indifference to the views of the great people of France, the Netherlands, and, we can safely presume, many other countries in Europe, including the UK, is unending.

Europe, the cradle of western civilisation, the birthplace of reason and democracy, deserves better. We shouldn't oppose the EU because we're suspicious of Europe. We should oppose it because we love Europe.

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