The more I see of the EU’s rude (and unelected) bullies, the more I yearn for us to call their bluff and walk away

NOT long ago I resigned from a club I had joined a quarter of a century earlier. The Secretary thanked me politely for having been a member, and wished me all the best for the future.

There were no threats or insults, and certainly no demand to go on paying a share of the costs of the club — rent, rates and the pension obligations of staff — after I had gone.

Leaving the European Union is a different matter. Not only are we expected to continue paying our portion of its future pension liabilities (which may be as much as £10 billion) as well as a ransom payment of untold billions, we are also being constantly lectured to and harried and abused by Brussels panjandrums.

I’ve no doubt millions of my fellow countrymen share my amazement at the tone of these admonishments, which resembles that of a strident, ill-tempered teacher dressing down an incorrigibly disobedient pupil.

The extraordinary thing is that while our accusers are unremittingly rude and overbearing towards us, our own negotiators led by the Brexit Secretary David Davis are unfailingly wellmannered and accommodating.

The most risible of the EU bovver boys is Jean- Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission. Last March, he boasted that no other country would want to leave the EU having seen how harshly Britain had been punished.

From the more sinuous and intelligent Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, we have had multiple threats. Earlier this month, he said he wanted to use Brexit to ‘teach the British people and others what leaving the EU means’.

Only last week, in a characteristically terse and charmless intervention, he insisted that Britain produce its Brexit proposals ‘as soon as this week’. I marvel that Mr Davis can keep his cool under such provocation.

Then there is the irascible Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s man in the talks, who endlessly chides the Government. He declared its plan was ‘not serious, fair or even possible given the negotiating time remaining’. British politicians needed ‘to be more honest about the complexities Brexit creates’.

Another member of the gang is Donald Tusk, President of the EU Council. In an unusually constructive statement on Tuesday, he said he was ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the progress of talks. But he then spoilt it all by insisting there was ‘ not sufficient progress yet’ to begin discussions over a trade deal.

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THAT he means the EU sets the agenda and timetable for talks, not us. Brussels high-handedly refuses to discuss post-Brexit trade arrangements until the Government has agreed to a ransom payment, and offered acceptable safeguards about the legal status of EU citizens in Britain and the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Let me observe in passing that, with the exception of Mr Verhofstadt, none of these gentlemen has been elected to their powerful jobs. And yet they treat our own elected representatives — from Theresa May downwards — with less grace than is due an incompetent parish councillor.

Isn’t it a strange sort of negotiation when one side continually threatens or abuses the other while maintaining that it, and it alone, has the right to decide how talks between the two parties should proceed? Needless to say, I find it is highly offensive that a respectable, law-abiding and hardly negligible sovereign state should be intimidated in this way by a bunch of mostly unelected Eurocrats.

But even more than feeling anger, I am grieved by this aggression. Despite deciding to leave the EU — and what a peremptory and arrogant organisation it is in the hands of Barnier and his intemperate colleagues — we are part of Europe, and wish to remain friends with all its countries.

History seems to count for nothing in the minds of these bullies. Have they forgotten how, more than seven decades ago, Britain impoverished itself, and sacrificed hundreds of thousands, in helping to restore freedom to the European continent?

And throughout the Cold War, British troops in Germany played a leading role in defending Western Europe against the threat of a Soviet invasion.

There may be no such thing as abiding gratitude in the affairs of nations. Yet the absence of even a few tattered remnants of respect or affection in these supercilious bureaucrats is shocking.

I can understand that they may have been hurt and bewildered by our decision to leave, and they should feel that their plan for a united Europe has been imperilled.

But there is no justification — after the horrific history of the last century, when this country bled itself for the freedom of Europe in two world wars — for the constant rebukes, and the imprecations of punishment.

A punishment, moreover, which if delivered would damage EU countries at least as much as us, since they enjoy a considerable trade surplus with Britain, which post-Brexit will be the European Union’s biggest trading partner.

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truth is that until this moment the Government has played the game entirely on the EU’s terms — accepting their agenda instead of our own, and absorbing their brickbats without complaint or hint of retaliation.

But if the European Union continues to be stubbornly unreasonable after Mrs May’s conciliatory speech in Florence last Friday, the Government should consider breaking off negotiations and, as the leading Eurosceptic Iain Duncan Smith puts it, ‘call the EU’s bluff on trade’.

In their infuriatingly schoolmasterly way, EU leaders will consider at their summit in just over three weeks whether ‘sufficient progress’ has been made on talks for them to allow all-important trade negotiations to go ahead.

If their answer is ‘No’, the Government should walk away for the time being in order to let the repercussions of the EU’s domineering approach sink in. It may begin to dawn on them that they have at least as much, if not more, to lose.

According to an entirely plausible report by researchers at Belgium’s University of Leuven which was published earlier this week, in the event of there being no agreement, and Britain reverting to World Trade Organisation tariffs, the EU would lose more than twice as many jobs as this country.

They reckon the return of tariffs to goods and services would cost just over half a million British jobs, and more than 1.2 million jobs in the remaining 27 EU states.

I hope there will be a deal, but not at the expense of this country being humiliated at every turn, and forced to stump up an extortionate amount of money in return for access to the single market.

The more that I see of the EU and its institutions, the gladder I am that we are leaving this dysfunctional club. I’m sure the rudeness and bullying of overmighty EU bureaucrats will have confirmed most Leavers in their views, and converted not a few Remainers.

In a mammoth speech on Tuesday extolling the virtues of a united Europe — despite most Europeans not wanting such an eventuality — President Macron of France suggested that Britain might want to re-join a reinvigorated EU.

It’s kind of him to think of us but, on the basis of the appalling record of Brussels satraps over the past few months, it is an offer we will just have to refuse.