Of course it’s a damnable libel to suggest that Britain is ruled by the EU. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are still an independent sovereign nation and we govern ourselves. It’s just that we are bound by a Common Agricultural Policy which is against our national interest. We had to agree to have our fishing industry destroyed by EU diktat. We can do nothing to limit catastrophic numbers of economic migrants from other member states. Our financial institutions are ever more shackled by EU rules and burdened by tax rates set by the super-state. We are unable to deport foreign criminals and perceived enemies of the state. Every day there come fresh examples of EU interference in our national life: this morning alone it is reported that the EU is telling us to alter the way we administer the Council Tax and instructing us to raise taxes on high value property purchases.

But if you catalogue and criticise the countless ways in which we are under the EU’s control, you will be accused of a Little Englander mentality and of xenophobia. The truth is that all the decisions of importance about what goes on in our country are taken in Brussels and Strasbourg. It was always intended that way. The founders of the European project envisaged “ever greater political union” from the start. This is not a matter of opinion or a paranoid fantasy, but the reality: the architects of the EU made their intentions plain on numerous occasions and their words are well-documented. Interviewed in the British press and on our TV channels, EU statesmen and leaders never show the slightest reluctance to agree that this ever-closer union is their aim.

David Cameron is making a pretence just now of talking tough. He says that if the arch-federalist Jean-Claude Junckers is appointed President of the European Commission, Britain “might have to leave the EU.” I say he is making a pretence because he has no intention to lead us out of the EU. Dave is talking big because he and his party are severely startled by the success of UKIP in the recent elections. The reality is that we live in a federal Europe already, a Europe that is dominated, ruled and exploited by the Germans. What Bismarck in 1870, the Kaiser in 1914 and Hitler in 1939 were unable to effect by force of arms, Angela Merkel has achieved by economic muscle and uber-bureaucratisation. Germany exercises hegemony from the Baltic to the Atlantic seaboard.

Here is the news: David Cameron will not be able to take us out of the EU – because, put quite plainly, Frau Merkel won’t let him