Oh that sense of déjà vu

There will be many arguments for staying in the EU but you can bet your bottom dollar that we shall see this one over and over again: The UK has a vital role to play in shaping the future of Europe. Now is not the time to turn our backs.

I can only surmise that Ian Baxter, Chairman and Founder of Baxter Freight and guest author on Open Europe has lived in a yurt in Outer Mongolia for the last twenty years and has not bothered to catch on the voluminous literature on the subject of Britain being able to shape "Europe" according to its ideas and how much "Europe" needs it.

We must stay in the EEC, we were told officially and unofficially in 1975 because that is the only way it can be turned into a democratic structure. How did that turn out, I wonder.

We must stay in the post-Maastricht EU and, indeed, support that treaty because that is the only way serious changes can be implemented and the structure made more open, more manageable, more democratic. Calling John Major.

We must go into the euro because otherwise the structure will not work (that is true but it would not have worked anyway) and, in any case, if we don't, we shall be the losers. Ahem, yes.

So here we are again. Britain has once again a great opportunity to shape the future of the European project, having not managed to do it in the past. Oh, I lie. There is one definite development in the whole history of the project that was put together by our own civil servants: the Single Market that imposes all the rules on all firms and organizations whether they trade with the other member states. Is that what these people had in mind?