In the run-up to a referendum, who will tell the truth about the EU – and will anyone listen if they do?

As a result of lies and half-truths fed to them over decades, huge numbers of the public believe that British ministers have no say in what “Brussels” decides, that the Commission is an over-inflated bureaucracy staffed by incompetent and lazy time-servers, and that the chief aim is to remove the sovereignty of member states and make them all identical. They think that health and safety rules all come from “Europe” and that the EU is responsible for policing human rights.

They know nothing about the Commission’s work on reducing and simplifying legislation. They have no clue that harmonisation is designed to facilitate global trade and that, in many cases, the US and China voluntarily adopt European norms for this reason. They also do not know that countries like Norway and Switzerland, which are not members, still have to comply with most EU legislation in order to trade with the Union. And if the euro is such a disaster, why has the pound been losing value against it?

(Dave Skinner, Tervuren, Belgium. (published in The Independent, May 2013)

Epicureanism stands working together and avoiding the sort of futile wars that preceded the European Union.