The previous extracts from Ten Years On have looked in particular at what life would be like for a free Britain. In our final extract, Lee Rotherham explores how the EU will have developed in the next ten years.

We are standing in a fresh-mown London park. The showers have kept away for this fine cobalt day, as the crowds loiter around the marquee. Lord Teddy Taylor has just concluded his welcome speech, congratulating in particular the guests who have just received their MBEs from the King. These are honours that have been a long time coming, granted for services to political campaigning. In one case over fifty years of grassroots activism dating back to the 1960s, has only now been recognised another ten years on from when Britain left the EU.

The service they rendered was fighting the argument on corners, on high streets and in markets, leafleting the public about the costs of EEC membership. At the time most people thought of them as eccentric. In retrospect, thanklessly they kept the flame burning.

The case has been proven by just how the EU has changed by comparison over the last decade. The Euro has pushed member states into adopting yet more tax harmonisation, and a role for the Board of the Central Bank in setting national rates.

Regions, such as Catalunya, Flanders, Northern Italy’s ‘Padania’, and Bavaria, have used Subsidiarity to pull more financial management down from Brussels, bypassing their national capitals and conducting it at their level. The effect is already being felt as several national governments see their centralised power ebbing away. Regional governments push for more money by linking up with their counterparts in neighbouring provinces. Belgium barely now exists other than in name. Such is the alchemy of European federalism.

Defence policy has had a disastrous run in the EU. Britain’s withdrawal from the emerging European arrangements had many consequences. It freed up the British defence industry from several contracts that the defence consortia would have chained it to, producing inferior products at higher price years after the deadline , a lesson all too slowly learned from the military Airbus, Eurofighter, Eurologistics, Euromissile and Horizon Frigate projects. Withdrawal had protected Britain’s special bilateral arrangements with the Americans over the transfer of technologies, and its sharing of intelligence, neither of which Washington trusted leaking out to the continental Europeans. And it woke some European capitals up to the fact that if they wanted to give Brussels some muscles to flex, they would have to pay for them.

By December 2011, the Americans had left Iraq, and a few years later, except for small numbers of trainers and special forces, Afghanistan had been vacated too, leaving the fight to an invigorated Afghan National Army. Yet of itself that did not leave the world a safer place.

The developing ‘European fist’, however, barely came out of its pocket. The brass buttons and brass bands of Eurocorps were not deployed during the Euphrates water dispute; the EU turned to Turkey as its proxy. An EU task force was not despatched to intervene in the South China Sea crisis over the Spratleys, since the Council of Ministers split over trade with Beijing. During the Djibouti incursion, the French were forced to act alone. More embarrassingly for European unity was when a German supplier for the Iranian Bomb was kidnapped by Mossad during a ‘holiday’ in Eritrea. Protests by a delegation to Tel Aviv, led by a Greek MEP, brought the smart riposte that it had been another German armourer who had sold the Turks cannons that brought down the walls of Constantinople.

In short, the EU never had just one foreign policy, it rarely had fewer than five; but in trying to have five, it ran none at all.

Within the EU, integration after 2010 ran more swiftly in other areas. The reality of having a single external frontier, no internal borders, a common immigration system, an embryonic Euro-FBI, and ID cards backed up by a computer network did reduce still further the sense that travelling from Santander to Biarritz, or from Amsterdam to Cologne, you were leaving a country and entering another. The programme of training the personnel the same way, sometimes communally in ‘European administrative schools’, certainly made the public officials feel more as if they were part of a common European service, especially now that the uniforms are standardised. The project of building a country called Europe, which ordinary people could see all around them and to which they owed their loyalty, began to become more visible in the polls.

It was further helped by the grands projets that French Presidents love; big symbolic schemes that left a huge imprint, and in this case came plastered with EU flags, billboards and publicity showing that the money came out of what was now openly called the “EU federal budget”. Examples included the Sicilian bridge, ‘linking Scylla to Charybdis’, to quote the movie advert that would so often be lampooned, the trans-Europa single rail network authority, and the new Brussels superministries.

Two of these ministries in particular drew attention for their lavish marble facades. The former DG Environment, lately renamed the European Environment Ministry, is perhaps a little ahead of itself in that it hasn’t formally been given a minister in any European treaty, but then this is how Brussels has always worked. Its power is really only matched by the Office of Federal Taxation, though here again so much lies in a name hiding a turf war between the Commission and the European Central Bank.

The Bureau of Shipping, covering the single-flagged EU merchant and fisheries fleets, comes a poor third in the grandeur scale, despite the tropical atrium. Yet it pays to look beyond the bronze iconry and unhinged abstract art when assessing other real centres of political power.

The Commission’s Department of Education only exists on its letter heads. Formally speaking it remains a Directorate-General but its role is betrayed by its reach. Two hours of every secondary school week is given over to European Studies.  Science lessons, for instance, explore the common ancestry of the discoverer.  European language classes are compulsory at the expense of Russian, Mandarin, Japanese and Urdu. History classes concentrate on the founding fathers of the EEC. Bonaparte and Caesar provide comparisons of past attempts to unite Europe. Hitler and Stalin are co-opted as reasons why the EU was created and needs to succeed. All this is reinforced by the Department’s standardised school books, teaching about the successes of the European Union from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, so that the schoolchildren of today can grow up to become the European citizens of tomorrow.

The staff naturally liaise with DG Culture, also today in 2020 a self-styled ministry. This is responsible for TV and Radio Europa, as well as an array of festivals, street parties, and proms across the EU and beyond. It is the new Jesuit Order in the EU’s struggle for the citizen’s allegiance and identity. It embodies the spirit of the twelve star flag, and showcases Europe’s unity by co-opting its greatest composers. Beethoven, Debussy, Verdi, and the like are wrenched from time and nationhood and made to emphasise the common citizenship and the mutual genealogy of the audience.

Other Directorates General are just as busy, but keep lower profiles. The Health people are occupied with putting together the framework for a common EU medical system. The skeleton for a common employment and social welfare system is in place, with legislation in the pipeline for a uniform welfare payment – the ‘first true EU tax on the pay check’. The flip side is that the red tape is again starting to flow, as bigger departments justify their importance by passing new laws to transcend borders. Sadly, the effect is a negative one, and already we are seeing a repeat of the economics of the turn of the century as businesses look to rebase themselves where costs are cheaper and interference less onerous, including, but not exclusively, Britain.

If Washington DC was Rome on the Potomac. Brussels DC is Naples on the Charleroi Canal.

It is a fairground for lobbyists, and the world capital for pressure groups. Take the Galileo programme. Billions of Euros wasted on a satellite system that duplicated the American GPS network and whose only function was to help Chinese missile cruisers  wargame off Taiwan. That programme kept lobbyists in Dollars, Yen and Renminbi for much of the early 2010’s. Then there is the constant lobbying over what counts as approved state aid, interpreted as an essential grant that keeps a social group or community going. For the past thirty years, the unofficial line has been that if it smelts, burns, types or flies and carries the country’s flag, the Commission will bend the rules to allow governments to subsidise it.

Sometimes the lobbyists get trumped by the mob. Back in 2012 the French had their own version of Britain’s ‘metric martyrs’ with a group of vintners ferociously defending their vineyard traditions. A few thousand angry farmers, joined by traditional German brewers, scuppered those proposals. It certainly proved far more effective than the failed lobbying within the system that the Dutch Government resorted to during the Musandam standoff in 2015. The threat to the Gulf oil supply had led to the Union taking control of the Netherlands’ North Sea reserves in order to guarantee gas supplies to member states. Public opinion in the Netherlands was outraged, but the Lisbon Treaty articles were there for all to read, and Brussels had the power to do it. But it could no longer do so to Britain.

So in summary we can say this much of the current European Union; that in 2020 it is where it would have been in 2035 if obstructionist Britain had not left. Ever-closer Union made these changes inevitable in all things other than timing. When we visit Brussels we see poop deck territory, the superstructure of a federal state, from where instructions are piped down to the member states’ civil servants below decks.

The difference is, of course, that Britain is not an ordinary seaman in the same boat.

By taking the big step in 2010 and breaking the cycle, the UK in 2020 is considerably better off, with an economy that now it has regained its competitive edge, is outpacing its EU competitors.

Meanwhile, the sheer amount of money saved has been astonishing.

Net payments over the whole of Britain’s membership, from 1973 to 2010, ran to £81 billion. That was the amount paid in total by Britain, just in membership fees, once all the grants it had received had been subtracted.

Gross, it ran to a quarter of a trillion Pounds, donated to the EU to be managed on our behalf.

It was a major show of trust in the efficiencies of a foreign civil service, quietly managing an ambitious political project that this country’s leaders openly rejected. But as history now effortlessly proves, it was a trust that was deliriously misplaced.