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1. Ukip and the BXP made the mistake of fighting an EU that was already dead. Eurosceptics were fighting the "Europe" of Kohl and Mitterrand, the Europe of Monnet, when they should have been fighting the monster it has become.
2. Ever closer union was less a motto as a root command, for coherent (though wrong) ideological reasons, building on the spirit of unity and reconciliation. That EU died shortly after the launch if the Euro. The high watermark of Monnet utopianism.
3. The people who founded and built the EU are now dead or retired, passing the torch to a new breed of eurocrat - spreadsheet sociopaths and technocrats who inherited a power. Power they weild for its own sake, to bring more under its direct control within and without.
4. The more I look at the EU today, the less I recognise it as the entity I devoted much of my life to leaving. It is now something far worse. It's raw, uncompromising legal force, without the philosophical evangelism of yore. It's colder somehow. Enslaved by its worship of rules
5. It uses words like partnership and cooperation but not in their true meaning. Rather they are technical terms in a rich legal lexicon stripped of their moral sentiment. I don't think it really knows why it exists anymore or where it wants to go.
6. It can never be a United States of Europe now. But it can't shed its supranational structure either. It's in a limbo of its own making so it does the only thing it knows instinctively... to assume more competences beyond its legitimacy and ability.
7. To that end, it has no interest in accommodating its neighbours. It seeks to subordinate, largely because it can, even if that means wiping out industries at the stroke of a pen even inside its own frontiers. It's no longer even pretending to strive for democratic legitimacy.
8. I never thought Brexiteer hostility to what the EU was, was proportionate or necessary but as it gradually dispensed with its founding values in favour of legal expansion, I'm starting to hate it as much as they always have. The EU and democracy can't even coexist.
