I am of course delighted to see Camer-moron badly miscalculate his control of his party and their serfs over Europe.

But I find it quite illustrative that his supporters for "later renegotiation" even in his own party choose human rights (which are not part of the acquis communautaire, but flow from the ECHR: not part of the EU or EEC as it used to be) as one of the things they object to, and also illustrative that they concentrate their fire on the GOOD bits of Europe for us: the social chapter and workers' rights.

Surely if they keep this up the penny must drop for the rest of the country what the conservatives REALLY stand for.

Fine, renegotiate straight bananas if you must, but the working time directive? Even the existing opt-out provisions are too much. How, for example, can you be safe when the doctor who is about to operate on you has done an 80 hour week already? This is something Thatcher specifically created as an opt-out.

The Safe Tea Elf has his excesses (for example I was refused permission to top up a dangerously low tyre the other evening by an ATS van that was doing a tyre on an artic, for "Health and safety" reasons. Now the airline at the motorway service station was out, so I had the choice of driving on up the motorway at 40mph, or abandoning my car, and he was using the same compressor to inflate a tyre on an artic - a safety critical component on a 40-tonner. Where is the contribution to safety in that?) but no-one wants to expose workers to dangerous conditions do they? Oh, my error - "Health and Safety" is one of the things the conservatives specifically object to.


European restrictions on barriers to trade are good for us: for example the recent ECJ ruling on trans-border broadcasts.


I'm not so keen on some ideas about trade mark law, or copyright law, but our own think tanks seem just as capable of getting those wrong - but at least Europe forms a barrier to some of the loonier restrictions on trade that US companies seek to impose (particularly on the internet and computer software).

Rough with the smooth. If you want to limit the powers your bosses have over you, Europe is your friend.