The Tories lost Devil's Kitchen's vote #94

The Devil's Kitchen dissects William Hague's posturing over Europe. And it is posturing, like when Michael Howard said he wanted to repatriate fishing policy, Hague even admits it saying:

Question: won’t the treaties need to be renegotiated to secure a more flexible Europe?

Answer: In my speech I advocated reasserting national control over certain areas such as social and employment legislation that would require negotiation.

And any renegotiating is not going to go our way, and even if it did the new treaty would require the agreement of every single other member of the EU. Which is not going to happen, especially if Mr Hague gets his wish and somehow the new treaty contains anything anglo-saxon, since that would never get past France.

We are not going to get a better EU, that produces better regulation. However as Helen of EU Referendum points out we do not need either. What we need is less EU, and less regulation. Let people get on with their lives and the crazy, unstructured, random search of people freely interacting will produce more happiness than the cleverest regulatory scheme

The truth is that these people do not really understand what the problem is. They quite genuinely believe that the way the world, its politics and economy, its social and legal structures, can function is by regulation. There can be no other way. The trick is to find “better” regulation.

This is why they prefer managerial governance to political and why they are so greatly in favour of transnational organizations made up of bureaucrats and lawyers to the messiness of genuinely democratic politics and the free market, the most efficient economic structure but one that frightens those who like to have everything in boxes.

DK does make one small mistake:

back in 1975 we voted to stay within the European Economic Community, a free-trade area.

The EEC was never a free trade area. It was a Customs Union, like the Zollverein that proceeded the foundation of Germany. Britain left a free trade area, EFTA, in order to belong to the EEC.