We are persistently told that "we" have a veto - but by "we" he means the government - which as he illustrates, not only does our government not veto things WE don't want - it presses for further integration and expansion.
The decision to throw open our borders was not one openly debated. It just happened to us and it was too late to stop before we realised what was going on. And that is typical of most EU measures.
There lacks the early warning system, totally inadequate means of public scrutiny, and no real means for civil society to shape decisions - unless of course you're a lefty NGO who agrees with the EU agenda. Then once something is done it cannot be undone.
Time and again we find that competences have been handed over - or appropriated by the ECJ without public involvement and we learn the transfer of power is only ever away from the people. Argue if you will that the dysfunction is that of the UK's own democracy, and few are likely to disagree - but the EU as it has evolved is a symptom of the dysfunction in our own democracy and that of EU member states.
All too often policy is the groupthink of disconnected political elites carried away by their vanity, signing up to binding obligations and target driven policy that we all end up paying for in our utility bills - often made worse by lamentable national implementation.
And then we are told we should remain and reform - but our elites do not want to reform the EU. They like it as it is. It facilitates their vanity. They would never even ask for fundamental reform as indeed the supposedly Eurosceptic Cameron demonstrated.
You tell us that the EU is always reforming. For sure it tinkers with policies - taking anywhere up to ten years to repair its harmful policies, but that isn't reform of the entity we know as the EU. It does not change the nature of the beast.
The only way to fundamentally reform the EU is with a treaty and no treaty is ever going to return powers to the member states. It operates to the doctrine of a beneficial crisis where the answer to problems it caused is always "more Europe".
We might be able to secure the occasional opt out - and we can even control the speed - but never the destination. Being that the UK public has never shared that vision and is at odds with its elites, the only logical course of action is to leave it.
In the end the last two years have proved us leavers right. So much integration has gone on that so very few people understand what has been done to us or even how, or what all the systems are even for. We have little collective idea of who is responsible for what.
What makes it all the more amusing is even the EU's official feeds sometime confuse the single market with the customs union. How can a government that doesn't even understand itself ever be accountable?
And then when we look at the whole system, we cannot say where the nation state ends and the Eu begins because there is no line of delineation. The EU is a government and our own administration is a regional function of it. Merged beyond the understanding of mere mortals.
Then we throw globalisation into the mix and it is equally difficult to tell what is an EU initiative and what is the result of global conventions and standards. How then can we hope to have responsive and transparent government?
For all that this benign technocracy has its many advantages it has killed politics stone dead - where the politics we have is a detached and remote abstract - a proxy for meaningful politics. Consequently the decision-making is in the hands of technicians, not voters.
That is not to say that modern governance can be made simple or that we do not need experts - but we do need to see it in the light of day and ultimately the wisdom of the public should hold the ultimate veto over our rulers.
If we the people do not have that ultimate sovereignty not then you do not have a democracy. No amount of elaborate voting rituals and ceremonies will ever make a foreign technocratic monster a true democracy.
National democracy may be flawed, and the arcane rituals of the commons are seemingly opaque, but we at least know who should be held accountable. The moment powers are given to Brussels they can just as easily be outsourced to the emerging global technocracy.
As much as this is a question of what the EU is - which nobody seems to know, it is a question of the direction of travel. What we see is a European political elite that will do what it likes, when it likes, and in the end will ignore public sentiment.
We unwashed plebs may not understand your machine or appreciate the technical brilliance of it, but it's no sin not to want to. People just want their government where they can see it and the ability to get rid of it when they need to. The EU can never accommodate that wish.
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