Happy birthday EU, and best of luck!

AS we stand at this crossroads, with only four days to go before we trigger formal talks on separation, the Mail today sends warm greetings to the European Union on its 60th birthday.

We look back fondly at the noble ideals that inspired the founding six nations – Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany – to sign the Treaty of Rome on March 25, 1957, bringing the infant European Economic Community into a war-weary world.

What high hopes attended its birth! This, they told us, was the dawn of a new age of peace and prosperity, in which former enemies would pull together for the common good.

No wonder British governments wanted to be part of it, though 16 years would pass before we were admitted to the club. But if we had known then what we know today, would we have joined in 1973 – or resolved to remain, by that 67 per cent majority, in the referendum two years later? The answer must surely be no.

For the truth is that the organisation sold to voters as a tariff-free trading zone – the Common Market, as it was known – has grown into a very different beast.

To be fair, the clue was in the first sentence of the Treaty of Rome, which laid down the signatories’ resolve to secure ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’.

This ambition went far beyond free trade. It was a blueprint for a supranational government – a United States of Europe that would render the nation state redundant and the wishes of individual peoples, expressed through the ballot box, increasingly irrelevant.

As the original six members became ten – then 12, 15, 25, 27 and now 28 – the EU became ever more unwieldy and less capable of adapting to a fast- changing world of emerging superpowers such as China and India.

At its heart sat a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels, spewing regulations as it pressed blindly ahead with unification, never mind the consequences.

A crazy and cripplingly wasteful Common Agricultural Policy pushed up food prices, supporting inefficient French farmers while brutally penalising the Third World.

Then came the disaster of the euro, whose catastrophic effects can be measured in the blighted lives of a generation of young jobless throughout southern Europe.

Indeed, one statistic says it all. Since our partners adopted the euro in 1999, the UK’s sterling-based economy has grown by 39 per cent. Meanwhile Italy, yoked into the one- size-fits-all currency, has barely grown.

Yet still the march towards enforced unity goes on, with a reckless open borders policy that has caused massive unease across the continent, leading to a resurgence of parties of the far Right and Left.

In this age of international terrorism, of which we were so viciously reminded this week, how much longer can Brussels persist in such lethal folly?

Yet despite all this, politicians such as Lord Heseltine, too vain and proud to admit they were ever wrong, keep insisting that the creaking monolith of the EU represents the future, while spreading doom and gloom about Britain’s prospects as a sovereign democracy once again.

Yes, there are tough talks ahead – and no doubt economic troubles, too, as the business cycle turns. But with Project Fear’s prophesies so far proving utterly groundless, and countries such as India and the US queuing up to do business with the UK, this paper looks ahead with great confidence.

On the EU’s 60th, therefore, the Mail wishes nothing but well to our soon-to-be ex partners. They needn’t worry about the UK, as we set off on the road back to freedom. But if the EU continues to resist reform, goodness, we fear for