Janet Daley has a good piece in the Telegraph today, castigating the Tories for the way in which David Cameron’s government is rapidly turning the serious question of Britain’s future in the European Union into a farcical “pantomime”.

Taking the government to task for letting down those people who ‘kept the faith’ and voted Conservative in May, Daley laments:

But what a dispiriting carry-on it must seem to most voters, especially the ones who were really happy that they had kept their nerve and voted Conservative.

But here’s the money quote:

But our EU membership did not create the non-contributory benefit system in which people who have never paid in receive indefinite support. Nor did it give rise to our unique universal, free at the point of use, rationed health care system. And it certainly was not responsible for the poor educational achievements of so many young British people that companies prefer to import labour rather than cope with the shortcomings of our school standards.

This hits at an important question. Why is it that we want Britain to leave the European Union in the first place? And why do we actually want to unshackle ourselves from an international “human rights” mechanism that has been hijacked and turned into little more than a guarantor of social democratic dogma?

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