Leading Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan

The General Election has only just finished, but the EU referendum campaign is already getting under way. The first settled which party would be in office; the second will settle whether elections in Britain matter at all.

Will the United Kingdom be an independent nation, trading with its friends on the Continent while living under its own laws? Or will it be part of a country called Europe?

David Cameron is touring EU capitals, making the case for relatively modest reforms. So far, his counterparts have played along, making a big fuss before the cameras over what they know to be quite trivial changes.

Yet they haven’t changed their minds about the EU’s destination.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, whom the PM met yesterday, has been admirably frank. ‘We need a political union, which means we must gradually cede powers to Europe and give Europe control,’ she said recently.

‘We cannot just stop because one or other doesn’t want to join in yet.’

Note the ‘yet’. Mrs Merkel is accustomed to getting her way in Europe.

The French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, also made clear that political integration was not up for discussion. ‘It is as if you joined a football club, and then half-way through a match started playing rugby,’ he said after hearing from Mr Cameron.

Actually, that’s pretty much how rugby got started, and it’s now a sport that connects Britain to the growing markets of the English-speaking world rather more than to the declining EU, but I doubt this is what Mr Fabius meant.

The trouble is that we don’t seem to be listening to what EU leaders are saying. As in the past, we are ignoring events on the Continent, leaving things until almost too late.

So far, the two-week-old debate seems almost like a repeat of the 1975 EEC referendum. It’s as if the intervening 40 years have taught us nothing; as if we were still talking about participation in a common market rather than about the political amalgamation EU membership now involves.

As in 1975, the multinational giants and the mega-banks are telling us that we must not leave; and, as in 1975, the Confederation of British Industry is pretending that its Euro-fanaticism is typical of British business as a whole.

Last week, the aviation giant Airbus UK got in on the act, vaguely hinting — though, of course, not actually saying — that a British withdrawal from the EU might result in the firm’s future investment here being reviewed.

So let’s get one thing straight at the outset. No one is talking about Britain leaving the European market. I don’t know a single Eurosceptic who wants to put up trade barriers against our allies in Europe. What we want is free trade rather than political union.

Nor, for that matter, have I met a single Eurocrat who says that withdrawing from the political institutions in Brussels would mean leaving the internal market.

On the contrary, EU leaders keep telling us that the alternative to our current EU membership is a free-trade-only relationship.

The idea that we’d face trade barriers if we pulled out exists only in the press releases of British pro-EU campaigners. They know perfectly well that it’s a straw man — though that doesn’t stop them bashing away at it for all they’re worth.

How can I be so sure that our trading relationship would not change? Because every state in Europe, whether or not it is in the EU, participates in the single market: Norway, Andorra, Turkey, Switzerland, Serbia, the Channel Islands and so forth.

The only exceptions are Belarus and Russia, which have instead chosen to form a Eurasian union.

Are we supposed to believe that only the United Kingdom would be excluded? That we’d be penalised despite the fact that, over the 43 years of our membership, we have bought more from the other member states than we have sold them, to the tune of £40 million a day?

It’s hardly normal, after all, for salesmen to chase away their customers.

What are the big corporations worried about? If our continued access to the single market is secure either way, why are they bothered about whether we take part in the various non-trade aspects of the EU, such as foreign affairs, energy policy, immigration and criminal justice?

To answer that question, look at which businessmen are lining up on which side. While the corporate types tend to be instinctively pro-Brussels, sensing that the EU was designed by and for people like themselves, the entrepreneurs often take a different view.

Listen, for example, to Peter Hargreaves, who co-founded Hargreaves Lansdown, one of Britain’s largest and most successful financial enterprises.

‘If you took a blank sheet of paper and wrote down all the benefits that derive from EU membership, you’d still have a blank sheet of paper.’

Or listen to Dr Nigel Wilson, chief executive of the insurance giant Legal & General, who told the Daily Mail earlier this week that the costs of EU regulation were holding Britain back in global markets.

‘I see the world as a huge opportunity for the UK, but we are underachieving by concentrating on Europe, which is growing too slowly,’ he said. ‘This will not lead to economic growth in the UK.’

Why don’t the CBI panjandrums and mega-banks agree? Part of the answer, I’m afraid, is that they have spent a great deal of time and money lobbying in Brussels to get rules that suit them, and that disadvantage their rivals.

When I was a new MEP, I was surprised by how keen big businesses were on regulation; I had innocently assumed that they would want less government interference.

Now I know better. The multi-nationals see EU rules as a useful way to raise barriers against smaller competitors, who can’t as easily afford the compliance costs. A glance at the EU’s lobbying register tells me that, last year, Airbus spent €500,000 (£360,000) on making its case in Brussels, employing ten lobbyists.

Doom merchants insist Britain cannot survive outside of the European Union

It’s hardly surprising that such a company should want to keep the status quo. Nor should we take remotely seriously the idea that it might in future reduce investment in Britain if we leave the EU.

F ifteen months ago, before the referendum campaign began and the Brussels apparatchiks started twisting arms, Airbus’s chief executive gave an honest assessment of his company’s intentions: ‘Clearly we have a massive investment in the UK and I don’t think there has ever been a plan to change that.

‘Profitable trade and political union are not joined at the hip. Russian and American companies trade with companies in Europe without being part of a political union. Business investment depends on profits, not politics.’

But now, in the heat of the campaign, Airbus is doing its bit for the pro-EU cause. So, even more, is the CBI, which is part-funded by the EU, having received £800,000 in grants from Brussels.

The CBI keeps getting it wrong. In the 1970s, it backed Edward Heath’s disastrous controls on prices and incomes. In the Eighties, it opposed Margaret Thatcher’s free market reforms and campaigned to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the Nineties, undaunted, it demanded that we join the euro.

Indeed, as late as 2003, Sir Mike Rake, the CBI boss who now tells us we mustn’t leave the EU, was solemnly assuring us that ‘the risks of staying outside the euro far outweigh any risks of joining’.

So whom should we listen to: the Brussels-funded lobbies, or the job creators? The people who got it wrong on the euro — Sir Mike Rake, Sir Richard Branson, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair, Ken Clarke, the CBI, the TUC, the BBC, the Financial Times — or the ones who got it right?

Successful British exporters such as JCB and Dyson have said we would be better off out — able to trade more freely with non-EU states. Are we going to listen to award-winning British manufacturers, or disgraced banks?

Ah, you say, but couldn’t we get the best of both worlds?

Mightn’t we negotiate a deal with the EU which leaves us in the single market but able to reject the things we don’t like, such as the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, the harmonisation of tax rates, the multi-billion-pound budget contributions, the open borders, the supremacy of EU law, the political assimilation?

I have no doubt that this is the most popular option. But is it on offer?

The question on the ballot paper has been altered slightly from the version that all Conservative MPs approved twice in the last Parliament. The neutral verb ‘be’ has been replaced with the slightly loaded ‘remain’.

The referendum will now ask: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’

How, then, should those who want a free-trade deal, but not a political union, answer that question? It’s now clear we can’t get such a deal by remaining inside. I have no doubt the PM will secure all his stated goals.

Most of them, after all, can be achieved through domestic legislation, and those which do require treaty change are largely trivial.

It goes almost without saying that he will be able, by the measure he has himself set, to claim victory.

But, when he has done so, we will still be members of the EU on something very close to the existing terms, subject to common policies in foreign affairs, justice, free movement of people, energy, farming, fishing, employment law and social policy.

We will, in other words, be voting on the EU we have come to know over the past four decades.

If Britain returned a pro-EU vote under those terms, it would be taken as an endorsement of the EU’s stated aims. It would be taken as a mandate to participate in the continuing process of political union.

Oh, sure, no one would ask us to abandon the pound, or participate in the EU army the Germans keep proposing. At least, not immediately.

But we’d have consented to the principle of further integration, and to the Merkel doctrine: ‘We cannot just stop because one or other doesn’t want to join in — yet.’

So, to get a common market rather than a common government, we shall have to vote ‘No’. Voting to leave the political institutions in Brussels means voting for a Switzerland-style relationship with the EU; one based on commerce and collaboration rather than political fusion.

Y ou can’t help noticing that the Swiss are doing pretty well. They top the European wealth league and, according to the United Nations, have the second-best quality of life in the world — with the first position going to fellow EFTA member Norway.

The Swiss are so happy with their current deal that their pro-EU campaign has admitted defeat and ceased operations.

Now here’s the clinching statistic. Switzerland sells four-and-a-half times as much, per capita, to the EU as we do. Let me repeat that extraordinary figure. Switzerland, from the outside, sells four-and-a-half times as much to the EU, proportionately, as we do from the inside.

If eight million Swiss are able to flourish, trading with the EU but governing themselves, how much more might 63 million Britons — a maritime people, linked by habit and history, by language and law, to every continent?

The revolution in technology means distance has never mattered less. We can connect to overseas markets, not least those English-speaking and common-law economies which are growing as the EU stagnates.

The case against the EU is not nostalgic, fearful or petulant; it’s optimistic, modern and global.

We are a buccaneering nation, able to see opportunities beyond the stagnant trade bloc on our doorstep. We are a secure democracy, which finds no reason to accept the primacy of unelected foreign officials.