BRITAIN! WHERE IS YOUR AMBITION?

He was one half of a famously confident double act. Now the man leading the camp to quit the EU issues a stirring call to arms...

SINCE David Cameron’s letter to the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, on Tuesday, setting out his four requirements for European Union reform, all is now clear.

Some time ago the Prime Minister proclaimed that the European Union was in need of ‘fundamental, far-reaching’ reform; that the reforms would need to be embedded in ‘proper, full-on, treaty change’; and that once he had secured all this, the British people would be asked in a referendum whether we wished to remain in a reformed EU, or to leave.

At the time, I publicly predicted that any changes he managed to negotiate would be inconsequential.

Reading the letter to Mr Tusk, it is clear that, if anything, I overstated the significance of the so-called reforms Mr Cameron would secure.

Even if he gets everything he has asked for – which is far from assured – the four changes he seeks range from the wholly inadequate to the completely meaningless.

The Prime Minister’s first request comes under the heading of ‘economic governance’, where he proposes that ‘any issues that affect all Member States’ (ie not just members of the eurozone) ‘must be discussed and decided by all Member States’.

But that is just what happens now; and when we disagree with a proposal, we are routinely outvoted by the eurozone caucus, which has a built-in ‘qualified majority’, and the proposal with which we disagree becomes law.

His second, equally empty, request is that there should be ‘a clear, long-term commitment to boost the competitiveness and productivity of the European Union’. Big deal. We have been here before. In particular, the so-called Lisbon Agenda of 2000 committed the EU to reforms that would improve its economic performance by 2010. Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened.

His third request is ‘to end Britain’s obligation to work towards an “ever-closer union” as set out in the Treaty’. He is right to focus on the fact that the whole purpose of the EU is to work towards a full-blooded political union, the United States of Europe; and that we in the UK do not share that ambition.

That is what lay behind the creation of the single European currency, the euro, and the eurozone, of which we are rightly not a part.

The eurozone has predictably been a disaster zone. As the Chancellor George Osborne has pointed out more than once, the monetary union cannot work without a fiscal – ie tax and spending – union, and this in turn requires there to be a political union with a single finance minister and single government. This is the purpose of the whole exercise.

But David Cameron’s request is completely meaningless. For the EU will continue to churn out legislation designed to pave the way to fiscal and political union, to which we in the UK will be subject, whether or not it is accepted that we want to be part of it.

Had Mr Cameron asked the EU explicitly to rescind the 1983 ‘Solemn Declaration on European Union’ – which commits Member States to ‘an ever-closer union of the peoples and Member States of the European Union’ – he might have been getting somewhere. But he has conspicuously failed to do so.

HIS fourth and final request concerned the vexed issue of immigration, where he proposed that immigrants should not be able to draw in-work benefits for the first four years.

But even if this were agreed, which is becoming highly doubtful, it would do little to stem immigration, since very few of those who come to the UK do so in order to draw in-work benefits.

But much more fundamentally, it does not in any way restore national control of our own borders – a power which every country in the world outside the EU rightly considers an indispensable attribute of nationhood. Indeed, Mr Cameron has explicitly stated that he does not wish to restore it.

The bottom line, then, is that the coming referendum will not be about whether we wish to remain in a ‘reformed’ EU, but whether we wish to remain in an unreformed EU, with ever more powers passing from the national parliaments to Brussels, whether we like it or not.

It is clearly in our national interest to leave.

And, of course, we have every right to do so, under the terms of Article 50 of the 2007 Treaty of European Union.

Those bankers and businessmen who claim that it would be economically disastrous to do so are the same bankers and businessmen who argued that it would be disastrous if we were not to give up our own currency and instead adopt the euro.

They were wrong then and they are wrong now.

It is true that the EU is an important export market for us, and will continue to be, albeit progressively less so as the more rapid growth of the emerging world continues.

But it is a complete myth that you need to be in the EU to trade with the EU, as the global range of goods in our shops readily attests. Indeed, over the past five years, exports to the rest of the EU from outside the EU have grown twice as fast as our exports have.

And in any event, we would conclude a free-trade agreement with the EU, which the EU and in particular Germany, would be anxious to do, given how huge the importance of the UK market is for their exports.

Meanwhile, we would be free of the growing burden of EU regulation and bureaucracy on British business and industry, whether or not it is selling to the EU – not to mention our annual subscription of some £11billion and rising for the benefits of membership.

So let us not be fearful little Europeans. The future growth of the world economy is going to happen much more outside Europe, with countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa growing faster as they gradually catch up with the West.

The time has come to rediscover our national self-confidence and ambition, to abandon a political project which, however highminded, we do not share, and to embrace a global future as a self-governing nation.

The PM’s demands range from wholly inadequate to completely meaningless