Spending a few days in Brussels recently was a sobering experience. How many of us realise just how irritatingly irrelevant we’ve become in the eyes of the rest of the EU? They’re fed up with us.

“If you join a golf club and then continually moan about the annual subscription, the course layout, the captaincies, the fellow members and keep threatening to quit then sooner or later you won’t have much choice,” one very senior (British) former official observed to me over dinner. “But if you resign because you imagine that somehow you can then re-join on your own terms, forget it. It’s not just Britain that has a veto.”

The sad thing is that we are so ill-informed. Reckon you know about Europe? OK, what’s the difference between the European Union, European Commission, European Parliament and the Council of Ministers? Can’t say offhand? Nor can most British newspapers. But we all understand the difference between the United Kingdom, Whitehall, Westminster and Downing Street.

Ever thought about Scottish independence leading to a separate application for EU membership? They’ve been wondering about it in Brussels for months. And they’re concerned not about the Act of Union, or the euro or the Schengen agreement. The worry is about the implications for Spain and Cyprus.

The really ironic aspect is that Brussels is rapidly becoming an English-speaking city. The change from ten years ago is amazing.

Shop assistants, restaurateurs, bus and taxi drivers, market stallholders and every teenager can all get by in what you might call euro-English. More significantly, it’s becoming the unofficial solution to the bitter divide between those Belgians with French as their mother tongue and those speaking Flemish.

English is now a compulsory subject in most EU schools and since it’s our mother-tongue we have an inbuilt advantage. If only we could forget about pink bits on the map (and our preoccupation with a war that ended 67 years ago) we could dominate a United States of Europe - which was Winston Churchill’s post-war vision.

I came back convinced about one thing: if we do flounce out, the other member-states won’t stand in our way. But they will bolt the door shut behind us. We need to realise that.

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