Great article, with which I agree with. However you have a couple of facts slightly wrong. The EU accounts have been signed off, certainly since 2007. However they were “qualified” with an “ acceptable “ margin of error of about 4%, or about €5 billion. This in itself is totally scandalous, as if losing that amount (mainly to fraud or corruption) was in itself “acceptable”. Don’t think I’d get away with that in my tax return. Also we don’t send £1.4 billion a month to the EU. The figure after rebate is lower, and lower still if you allow that money does come back to us in the form of grants, agricultural payments, etc. The total we pay out net is £8–10 billion on average in recent years.

The EU works like some medieval monarch sprinkling patronage to the grateful people. We have no say in these grants and allocations, but sadly people who are recipients forget where the money actually came from; the taxpayer. It’s funny though how people don’t thank or remember that the taxpayer pays for all the mundane stuff like roads, schools and hospitals.

Alec Ross,in his excellent book, Industries Of The Future, talks about Open and Closed Societies, and how only Open Societies will flourish in the future. In an interview recently he used the EU, and it’s bureaucracy, as an example of a Closed Society, totally out of touch with the fast changing world.