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All noted with thanks, David. In return can I recommend to you and to others a book I've only just come across, though it's old: Max Beloff, "Britain and the European Union: Dialogue of the Deaf" (1996)? This supplies the historical and geopolitical perspective which to "antis" like you and me seems so inescapable a part of the whole EU picture but which our "pro" friends find so hard to understand, or even to see. Even on their favourite "economic" ground they would benefit from doing a little more reading and from parroting the politicians and the BBC commentators a little less. I couldn't help laughing at the innocent assumption of one of the Anon's that the only cost of all these economic goodies is the proportion we pay to the EU annual budget. This is a bit like saying that the cost of bringing up a child is no more than the pocket money you give him every Saturday. Obviously, since the debatable economic benefits are the only benefits we get from membership (and these days the pros themselves scarcely suggest any others), then the price we pay for them is the total expense of our membership, which includes the direct and indirect costs of passing, implementing and enforcing the flood of legislation emanating from Brussels, the cost of housing, education and medical services and welfare benefits to foreign EU “citizens”, the cost to British industries and businesses of unfair competition with their subsidized continental counterparts, the loss of business and trade in other parts of the world, the cost in judicial time and resources of dealing with “European Law” - and no doubt a great many other items which would occur to an economist.