Comment: Daniel Hannan (pictured), Conservative MEP for South East England, says people feel let down and lied to on the issue of immigration

Suppose you wanted to buy a car.

Would you say to the existing owner: ‘You should know, before we discuss the price, that I am determined to buy from you in any event’? After thanking his lucky stars for sending him such a dunderhead, the seller would charge you as much as he thought you could afford.

That observation may sound so obvious as to be hardly worth making. Yet it is precisely the position the Government has got itself into vis-à-vis the EU.

No one in Brussels thinks David Cameron would ever lead a campaign to leave. Whatever deal he comes back with, Eurocrats believe, he will recommend it to the British electorate — backed, naturally, by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders. So why bother to offer him any concessions?

It’s already becoming clear that the renegotiation will leave things much as they are.

We’ll still be in the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, and the Euro-foreign policy. We’ll still be EU citizens with passports and driving licences to prove it. We’ll still pay enough into the Brussels budget to give Britain a two-thirds cut in council tax. We’ll still be signed up to the principle of free movement for EU nationals.

Of course, there will be some token changes. It will be declared that the words ‘ever closer union’ no longer apply to Britain. Just the words, mind you: the reality over deeper and deeper integration will remain.

Some restrictions will, I’m sure, be placed on the migration rights of future EU members, such as Montenegro and Macedonia. There will also, almost certainly, be some tightening of the rules on benefits claims. But the basic principle that any EU citizen may live and work in any EU state is, everyone agrees, off-limits.

Prime Minister: No one in Brussels thinks David Cameron (above) would ever lead a campaign to leave the EU

When I say ‘everyone’, I mean all the Eurocrats and all the UK political leaders.

Everyone, in other words, except the general population.

The country at large has never accepted the principle of unrestricted settlement rights.

It is EU immigration, above all, that has fuelled the rise of Ukip, as much in Labour as Conservative areas — witness how close Nigel Farage’s party came to winning the by-election in Heywood and Middleton, a solid Labour seat since its creation.

People feel let down and lied to on the issue of immigration, and they have a point.

When the UK opened its borders to the ten new states that joined the EU in 2004, the Home Office predicted that around 15,000 migrants would come each year. In fact, over the next two years, 447,000 arrived.

That statistic alone should put to shame those who claim that the public is ignorant and that we should trust the experts. It’s the ‘experts’ who got us into this mess.

Over 13 years of the last Labour government, the number of settlers who came to the UK was close to four million.

A quarter of all babies in England and Wales are now born to foreign mothers. No country can absorb such numbers without pressure on infrastructure and societal tensions.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is the most senior politician in Britain who is prepared to make a case for more immigration. Buoyantly, cheerfully, expansively, he points to the link between immigration and prosperity.

The city he governs, as he correctly says, would not function without importing people, from the stolid German financiers to the cheerful Romanian teenagers who sell them their coffee on the way to the office.

Control: When the UK opened its borders to the ten new states that joined the EU in 2004, the Home Office predicted that around 15,000 migrants would come each year. In fact, over the next two years, 447,000 arrived

But, Boris adds, there is a limit. If people are to accept the case for immigration, they want in exchange a sense that Britain is in control of who is arriving and in what numbers. At present, they have no such sense — because of the EU.

That is why Boris this week called on David Cameron to campaign for an EU exit if he does not get his way on border controls. And Boris is absolutely right. The fact is that the Coalition has done what it can, within the constraints of EU membership, to tighten the rules. The bogus colleges by which people used to enter Britain on student visas have been closed down.

Explaining a link: The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is the most senior politician in Britain who is prepared to make a case for more immigration

Work permits are more strictly controlled. There is no longer an automatic presumption that families with one member living here and another abroad should be allowed to reunite in Britain rather than the other country.

But, although non-EU immigration has fallen substantially since the election, the reduction has been almost completely cancelled out by the increase in the migratory flow from Europe.

As so often, a British government finds itself unable to fulfil its manifesto promises because the ultimate authority in the UK is not Parliament but the EU institutions whose writ, under the terms of our 1972 accession deal, has primacy over our national law.

No one, Left or Right, would design an immigration policy like this — one where we are, in practice, forced to turn away skilled workers from other continents in order to free up space for EU migrants.

No one would have come up, from first principles, with a situation where an Indian computer programmer or a Canadian brain surgeon struggles for admission while EU migrants, whatever their skills, whatever their qualifications, whatever their criminal records, have an automatic right of residence.

Why do we put up with it?

Because our leaders won’t contemplate leaving the EU. Our membership is treated as a given — a fact around which other policies must be slotted.

Lord Hill, David Cameron’s nominee to the European Commission, told delighted MEPs last week that a British withdrawal was unimaginable.

Why, hearing this, should those MEPs, or their national leaders, give us a meaningful new deal?

Business: As long as the others know that we’re staying, we won’t be able to reduce our budget contributions or halt the envious and malign directives aimed at hurting the City

What goes for immigration goes for every other aspect of our membership. As long as the others know that we’re staying, we won’t get to opt out of common policies on defence or criminal justice or fisheries or tax. We won’t be able to restore our stiff blue passports or negotiate trade agreements with our Commonwealth allies.

We won’t be able to reduce our budget contributions or halt the envious and malign directives aimed at hurting the City.

Indeed, it’s not just that we won’t do any of these things. It’s that, because our leaders have made up their minds to stay, and because they don’t want to look as though they have been unsuccessful in the talks, they won’t even ask for such concessions.

A quarter of all babies in England and Wales are now born to foreign mothers. No country can absorb such numbers without pressure on infrastructure and societal tensions

As someone who thinks Britain would be wealthier and freer outside the EU, this doesn’t bother me.

The clearer it is that the referendum is on the existing membership terms, rather than some sham new deal, the easier it will be to convince the country to leave.

But since all three Westminster party leaders want to remain in, let me offer them some advice.

Cast your minds back, gentlemen, four weeks.

Remember how you reacted when, for the first and only time, it looked as though Scotland really might vote to leave the United Kingdom.

All of a sudden, every imaginable concession was put on the table. Faced with the prospect of a break-up, and all that it implied — a stock market collapse, a run on the pound, a crisis in Nato — you were prepared to offer anything in your power.

Now imagine that, instead of campaigning to leave the UK, Alex Salmond had asked meekly for more autonomy.

Does anyone think we’d have seen the same response?

Well, apply the same logic to Britain and the EU.