However, on a political level, Europe is a mess and I wouldn’t touch their systems of government with a barge-pole. Italy’s in particular is an abomination. Until you read other people’s history and understand their daily lives, you don’t realise how precious some of our traditions of law-making and justice are.

The Lib Dems need to move beyond their dewy-eyed “I love Europe” moment and consider in concrete terms where the current direction of the EU is heading: fully-fledged political union. Unless they can explain to the public how Britain can carry on along that path without losing its identity, independence and precious-won freedoms, then Europe will always be a major vote-loser for them.

I don’t think that’s the case at all – I very much doubt that anybody in the party wants to do that. We want to see an EU that is democratic, transparent, connected – and we’re never going to get that if we sit on the sidelines, carping. Power should be held at the appropriate levels – so matters like climate change, defence, trade, should all be held by the Union, as that’s the level where they can be effectively weilded. Whether a double yellow line is needed on Elm St should be held by a local council, or area committee. The truly useless level of government is Westminster – it’s too far removed from people to deal with local issues, and not strategic enough to cover the big things.

Yes, of course I support the desire to see the peoples and nations of Europe work together in a coherent political structure to achieve our common aims. But that is not at all the same as supporting the existing EU which represents just one particular notion of how this should be organised – and not a very coherent one at that!

As other have commented, the EU is arrogant, remote, wasteful and corrupt. Its disregard for small nations that vote the ‘wrong’ way (most recently Ireland yet again!) is infamous, yet the Lib Dems seem committed to supporting this nonsense.

The key question to ask – and answer – is ‘Who does what?’ Which level of government is responsible for which activities.

I would support a version of the EU where Brussels did only those things that ALL member countries agreed it should do – and only those things.

In the USA this approach is clearly spelt out in the 10th Amendment to the Constitution – namely that “The powers not delegated to the US by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Something similar in Europe would enable the Lib Dems to square support for devolution with support for the EU – it’s essentially the same solution at different levels.

I think it’s very sad that the principled sympathies of “pro-Europeans” like Prof. Leighton lead them to naively follow the dictats of a corrupt, centralising elite which does everything it can to suppress democracy and avoid accountablity.

One day liberals might wake up to this reality.

The party as a whole needs to justify its desire to put more power in the hands of a distant, opaque, undemocratic and corrupt institution, when it claims to believe in devolution of power to the lowest levels.

That said, I do applaud Chris Davies’ public efforts to highlight and correct the corruption in the EU. He does us credit as an MEP.

The first is effective Europen cooperation in the international economic re-thinking and re-jigging that will be needed to get the whole world out of the recession. As Martin Wolf says today in the Financial Times , even the USA cannot do enough to pull itself out of the recession without the rest of the world pitching in.

The second is serious effort to reform the way the European Union works. That means facing what is now wrong about the EU:

“The evident failings of Europe’s present institutions are, in summary:

1. Many officials of the Commission display, almost proudly, the symptoms of a bureaucracy which maximises its own satisfactions. That is to say, they are very comfortable, avoid accountability, are rather ineffective, are expensive for what they do, and show persistent tendencies to tolerate corruption. The bureaucracy needs much more demanding leadership, management and oversight.

2. A shortage of effective control of activities and of expenditure.

3. An apparatus for reaching political compromises that is cumbersome, not consistently framed, and slow.

4. Institutional arrangements for putting forward the arguments of common interest have become diffuse and weak, as much within the institutions as in relation to the peoples of Europe and the wider world.”

The need for action on the second issue to achieve results on the first is obvious.

I am not a “passionate European”. It has just seemed natural to me all my adult life that europeans belong together in a diverse world, and I am one of them. But we europeans need effective coordinated European action too badly to put up with what Brussels now provides.

The article wasn’t about why anything the EU did was good, but calling it good in a general sense and asking us to defend it to the public. I think a better approach is to acknowledge the very real problems and put to the public that we can benefit from the EU and fix them.

We should bring to peoples attention the many good things it does and has done, as well- and that should be the lead in our pro-european arguments, not the vauge vision points offered in this piece. Examples convince more than “vision”.

Do we really need to add these criticisms every time? It’s not as though there’s a lack sources criticising the EU and thoe attacking it are never required to balance their pieces in this way – I’d like to imagine that it might not be necessary explicitly to spell out every time that support for the EU does not equate to blind unquestioning devotion to its every facet.

Variations of this trick abound in politics (and can be seen in spades in debates about the Gaza situation) and reasonable people often seem to get caught out by them.

But your piece has nothing to say about the actual governing process of the EU- probably because theres not much good to say about it. Nothing to say about the EU’s spending- probably because half of it is on crop subsidies. Nothing to say about its role in organising tariffs against the third world.

The EU is vulnerable to criticism becuase of its very real problems. We aren’t cheerleaders, we are a political group working for change- and while we must defend European co-operation, we cannot let this stop us from also bringing up the EU’s major problems and demanding real and huge change.