Mick Hume on the issue.

As the resident libertarian Marxist on these pages, I do often find myself in the same camp as traditional Eurosceptics. I am all for abolishing the British monarchy, don’t much care whose head is on our currency (so long as it’s not Jamie Oliver) and am rather more pro-European than most professed Europhiles on an issue such as free immigration.

But there is a big difference between Europe the continent, with its dynamic, civilised peoples, and the “legal personality” of Official Europe, a dead weight around the neck of the civilised world. Time to raise an argument not heard enough in this clichéd debate: for Europe, but not the EU.

The EU supra-state has become a bastion of all that is rotten in politics, its first instinct always to regulate, restrain and ban. The EU mindset is now the opposite of the spirit of the European enlightenment. For years, politicians of both the Left and Right have retreated from the battlefield behind the Euro-barricades, trusting the judges and commissioners more than their own people.

Then in 2005, French and Dutch voters stunned their arrogant rulers by rejecting the EU Constitution. Now Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President and architect of that constitution, admits that the public is being led “to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly”. What part of “non” don’t these aristos understand?

Despite the talk of divisions between EU leaders at this week’s summit, the one thing they seem united about is that their agreement need not be put to a referendum. The European Commission chief has warned Tony Blair not to give into “populism”. For his part, Mr Blair now even admits that he didn’t really agree that there was a need for any vote on the constitution, despite Labour’s manifesto commitment. (That echoes the high-handed attitude of the Conservative Government that signed the Maastricht treaty creating the EU.) And Gordon Brown’s people have let it be known that there will be no referendum on his watch because it would be “unwinnable”. What if they thought the same about elections?

All of these arguments drip with patronising contempt for the peoples of Europe, apparently considered too fickle or just too thick to grasp the subtleties of the Euro-elite’s ways. When much of the political class unites to tell us that there is no need for any controversy or public consultation, it surely ought to be the cue for a big debate and some serious boat-rocking.

Perhaps it is time for a vote, not on how to make us fit for Euro citizenship, but on whether the EU is fit to have all of us as members. What Europe needs is not a quietly agreed peace treaty, but a war of words; not a deal stitched up by the Euro-aristocracy, but a democratic revolution.