Rule 34...

Rule 34 is an internet adage in the "Rules of the Internet" list of protocols and conventions which asserts that if something exists, there is porn for it. Nothing you can conceive of has not been corrupted. The same is also true of global regulation. To test this thesis I have happened upon a new game similar to "I spy".

Pick any object at random in the home or the office or out and about in the streets and you will find regulation for it. Just looking at my audio monitors in front of me on my desk and I can find at least two directly related sets of regulations. And as with all regulations I've looked at so far, I'm now struggling to find a single one that is not somehow the product of the international regulatory machine. From electrical safety standards to electromagnetic shielding through to energy efficiency, there's a raft of regulation that every day products must comply with.

That much is not going to be news to readers of this blog, and every day the case that the EU is is a redundant taker of law rather than a maker of it grows stronger. Even broader EU directives instructing governments to form laws of their own do so in accordance with international conventions and global industrial standards. Once you start digging for this dynamic you start to find it everywhere.

What this underscores for me is the simplest response to the europhile assertion that Norway has no say in the making of EU rules is simply to ask why it would want a say at that level? With a veto of its own, it can steer the lawmaking process long before it is handed to the bottom feeders in the European Parliament.

There is a vast machine of regulation making rules for just about everything globally, where non EU states are well ahead of the curve in implementing them. Even third world countries are ahead in some respects as they are very much the plaything of the sustainable development agreements and conventions.

I think I've been making the "top table" arguments for going on two years now, trailing in the wake of www.eureferendum.com, but only now am I beginning to grasp the scale and complexity and the power and scope of the global machine - and its significance in the globalisation process. As it happens, other eurosceptics picking up on this field of study are getting it a little bit wrong, but I actually don't blame them. It's difficult to piece together and what is sometimes true is not always true as the associations and alliances are fluid depending on the subject area - and how badly the EU wants control over it.

Moreover, if people are even dimly aware of what's going on then they are well ahead of the curve and certainly better informed than any europhile I have thus far crossed swords with. Howsoever, when time permits, I will be looking to detail some of these distinctions as we have made a big deal of our side getting our facts right. That's not easy either. Of what is available we find most reference material on the subject is either samples of academic tract, obscure press releases and international studies textbooks starting at some pretty eyewatering prices. While this stuff is notionally in the public domain, it is still very much a specialist area - and hardly surprising it does not feature in the vistas of our infantile media.

Once you've grasped the significance of inter-agency alliances (and corporate lobbying within) and how those can outpace the expansion of the EU internal market and aspirational agreements like TTIP, you see a whole other world open up where the EU is a bit player, struggling to keep pace, and excluded under the weight of its own bureaucratic inertia.

Certainly the smug, self-satisfied europhiles who scoff at this most provable thesis have proven themselves to be the the inward looking and parochial ones when it comes to a global outlook. We will see them go into full denial mode as more and more Leavers pick up this thread and start exploring it further. The one consistent quality the Remains all have in common is their willingness to lie - and lie they will. Nothing is a greater threat to their walled garden Europe ideal because the truth reveals it is built on foundations of intellectual sand.

While I still expect to lose the forthcoming referendum through the incompetence of the lead campaign I still think this will be a landmark event, when the old guard eurosceptic movement dies off to make way for the new globalists who will oppose the EU on the basis of what the EU stands in the way of - a global single market and real free trade.

As we remain shackled to the EU as a second tier member it will become apparent that we're relegated to third rate influence, excluded from the global community and stifled within the EU. The next time our membership of the EU is up for debate, if we have lodged into the public consciousness just how much the EU obscures the real agenda from view, then this will not have been a total waste.