There you have it: a perfect summary of the European Union philosophy. In comments which were presumably made without embarrassment, a clutch of senior EU officials last week provided the Telegraph with a concise summing up of how this thing works. The UK, they said, will be forced to give up on Brexit when faced with “the bureaucratic nightmare” in which it will be entrapped by the most vindictive (sorry, the toughest) negotiations that could be devised.

If I hadn’t long passed the point of being shocked, I would find this breathtaking. Here it is, laid out in the most blithe, confident terms: the shameless contempt for a clear expression of democratic will, and the blatant use of the power of an unelected bureaucracy to undermine the intentions of a national government. Not to mention the utter, imperturbable belief in their own righteousness which justifies what might seem to the benighted oiks who think there is some sort of virtue in self-government, like an outrage.

And:

When some future Gibbon comes to chronicle the decline and fall of this modern European empire, it will be clear enough what went wrong: they enforced uniformity instead of trying to understand difference, and in the end, they revived exactly the hateful forces they had hoped to extinguish.

David Fuller's view

The EU is a club which European democracies can join, but apparently not leave of their own free will when the rules change, as they certainly have. 

This additional article: Elected, yet strangely unaccountable, from The Economist provides further insights.   

Here is a PDF of Janet Daley’s article.