The EU’s institutions work very badly. It is characterised by poor democratic accountability, an excess of remote bureaucracy and excessive regulation.

As a result, its decisions have tended to be bad – from the Common Agricultural Policy to the euro.

Moreover, it is bent on more integration and therefore more regulation and harmonisation as it pursues “ever closer union”.

o listen to the proponents of EU membership you would think that if we were outside then all British exports to the EU would cease.

We would have “shut ourselves out” of the Single Market. This is hogwash. We would still have access to it – but not on the same terms as now. We would be in the same position that India, China, Japan, the US or umpteen other countries are when successfully selling into the EU.

Their exports have to meet European standards but the difference is that the vast bulk of the economy that is not involved with exports to the EU does not have to comply. It is true that we would not have the same influence on those regulations if we were outside the EU.

Yet these other countries seem to manage to export successfully into the EU without having any inside “influence”, European commissioners or seats in the European Parliament. If they can do this why couldn’t we?

One answer that is often given is “because we are small”. But we aren’t. We are actually rather large. Our GDP is the fifth or sixth largest in the world. It is widely believed that current demographic trends will, within the next few decades, make us the largest economy in Europe. Anyway, small countries like Singapore and Taiwan also export successfully into the EU.

It is true that just exiting from the EU does not necessarily imply that we would remove all burdensome legislation and regulations. But we would be free to choose to do this, whereas at the moment we do not have the choice.

Perhaps most importantly, with the EU moving towards still greater integration, conditions of membership are not going to remain constant. Before long, if we stay in, we may find our freedom of manoeuvre on fiscal matters severely restricted and us unable, if we wanted to, to go down the low government expenditure/low taxation route.

David Fuller's view

Long before the European Union and the euro, I had strongly favoured the original European Economic Community, sometimes referred to as the Common Market, created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957.  This was a sensible, peaceful programme of free trade among the participating European member states which gradually increased in number. 

However, it soon became apparent that this was just the politically acceptable opening chapter in a programme to create, in effect, a ‘United States of Europe’.  I believe even Winston Churchill was among those calling for this following the Second World War, to finally end Europe’s long history of nationalism and military conflict, although I do not think that he expected Great Britain to be part of it.  

The objectives were laudable but the devil was in the details.  Today, I find it hard to believe that the European Union has had the economic success that we might have seen with just the European Economic Community or Common Market.  Europe remains a serial economic underperformer, and this has actually revived nationalistic sentiments.    

I had hoped that the EU’s severe economic crisis in recent years would have led to some sensible economic reforms.  It still may, at some point, but there is no evidence of this today.  If the UK held a referendum later this year on whether to remain part of the EU or to pull out, I think a majority of us would choose the latter.