However, the Human Rights Act, and the European Convention on Human Rights on which it is based have changed that. These state that everyone has rights, regardless of how they use those rights, and regardless of how much or how little they respect those rights in others. This is their major flaw: they grants rights unilaterally. That is, irrespective of how much or how little your respect that right in others, you still keep it yourself. If you commit murder, you deprive someone of their right to life, and their widow’s and children’s to the right of family life, as you have killed a member of their family. Yet the Human Rights Act says you cannot be executed (right to life), and have total rights to family visitations in jail (right to family life). Thus, you have taken other people’s rights, and yet still retain them yourself. This is morally indefensible. If the human rights act said you had rights until, or you had rights except for when, then it would be vaguely acceptable. But it doesn’t, so it isn’t.

The criminals are aware of this. Again and again, they ruthlessly and savagely abuse the rights of their victims, yet once they are caught immediately invoke the human rights act. After all, you may have been mugging, stealing, raping and killing, but the human rights act says you keep all your rights regardless of how little you respect those rights in others. I do not blame criminals for slyly taking advantage of laws in their favour. After all, criminals are creatures of opportunity, and human rights laws allow an opportunity for them to keep their “rights”, even when they don’t respect them in others. But I do blame the politicians who put those laws there in the first place.

Cameron originally stated that he would abolish the Human Rights Act. He has now retreated and said he will leave it untouched for five years. This tells me he is in favour of it. After all, he must have an opinion on it now, and if it is a negative opinion, why wait five years, by which time you could be out of office again? Even if he did abolish it, that would not change the fact that we are still bound to the European Convention on Human Rights upon which it was/is based. EU members are obliged to obey the convention. Non-EU members are not. If we want to start punishing criminals again, we need to pull out of the EU first.

Socialism is often cast as the highest form of altruism. That is, money is taken from those who can afford it, and then transferred to the sections of society in greatest need of support. However, socialism is far from selfless altruism. It perverts democracy at the national level, seeds mistrust at the interpersonal level and saps self reliance at the personal level.

At the national level, socialism is used by politicians to buy votes. In Northern England, a large percentage of the population depend on state hand outs. In other words, the Labour party can and does say “Vote for us, and your money keeps coming in. Don’t vote for us, and who knows what will happen”. Democracy is supposed to be about a contest for ideas, but the instant several hundred thousand voting cattle immediately vote for one party because they are essentially paid to, is the instant democracy is dead. The voting cattle will selfishly vote Labour, regardless of their merits.

At the interpersonal level, socialism sows tremendous suspicion between people. The council estates of this country are full of people who are what the Victorians would call the “honest poor”. Yet they live in bitter resentment of their neighbours because of the socialist welfare state. After all, the plumbers and brickies live next door to dole scroungers who benefit from the socialist welfare state, and the resentment they feel often causes problems. The selfishness the welfare state promotes is behind this mistrust between people.

It promotes selfishness at the personal: after all, if I can sit around all day and have people work to keep me, why should I work? Without the desire or need to work, this laziness transfers itself to other aspects of life, and thus a person’s dignity and independence collapses.

Far from being selfless, socialism is actually a very high form of selfishness.

In actual fact, two points need to be borne in mind. Firstly, the EU’s soft power is fictitious – it is factors much more basic and primal that attract people and nations into the EU orbit than moral purity. Secondly, anyone who doubts America’s awesome soft power is a fool.

Let us take the first point. The EU brags that its soft powers of persuasion have brought Eastern and Southern European countries into the EU, with more lining up to join. It was less to do with the soft power of persuasion, and more to do with the hard, cold promise of massive salary hikes for their politicians and massive grants for their special interest groups if they joined. Even the most ardent Europhile would struggle to deny this. Furthermore, countries which are rich enough not to want or need the EU’s cash ignore it routinely. China and Russia are not about to start emulating the EU.

Secondly, American soft power is extraordinary. Here in Belgium, I went to the cinema the other night. Outside the cinema, teenagers in American jeans were listening to American music on their America iPods as they waited to see an American film with American actors. As they greeted their friends, they used American sayings like “cool” and “awesome” in their conversation. Here in Brussels, the very heart of the EU empire, young people were more influenced by America than the allegedly all powerful EU soft power state with its HQ just a few miles away from the cinema.

Compare this with the EU’s cultural influence. American films are global, and more than half of the films at the cinema that night were American. Yet European films rarely make it out of Europe, and many don’t even make it out of the country it is made in. Here in Belgium, films don’t even make it into other parts of the French speaking world, not even neighbouring France. How many kids outside cinemas in America are wearing European clothes, listening to European music on European appliances, talking to their friends in European slang and waiting eagerly to see a European film with European actors?

In short the EU boasts about its alleged soft power, but this soft power only seems to work on countries which are peripheral to global politics, and even then, at closer inspection, it is cold hard cash and not soft power that does the trick. Secondly, America does have soft power in addition to hard power, and that soft power has a powerful reach, particularly on the young, and particularly in Europe. Finally, as the EU labours to build a Euro Army, could it be they are now coming clean about the short comings of alleged soft power?

The truth is Churchill did support some kind of co-operative structure for European countries. That is beyond dispute. What is up for debate is exactly what nature that co-operative structure would be, and whether the structure we now know as the EU was the kind of thing Churchill envisaged. After all, Churchill’s words in his speech were “a kind of United States of Europe”, and left open the question of exactly what kind he meant.

When Churchill spoke of the United States of Europe, his reference point was the USA. In the United State of America, member states have tremendous autonomy, from everything to setting their tax rates, to the death penalty. This choice does not exist in the EU, where all states must “harmonise” their laws. Would he have supported the kind of United States where this autonomy was lacking?

Did Churchill support some kind of European co-operative structure, the answer is yes. Did he mean the EU, the answer is probably not, given its characteristics. Perhaps a bigger question exists. What role did Churchill see for Britain in this structure? It is one thing to see the benefits of setting up a club, and quite another to see it as being the kind of club you want to join yourself.

Let us look at the text of Churchill’s United State of Europe speech. In the closing remarks he says “… France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the Commonwealth, mighty America and…Soviet Russia…must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe”. So, Churchill viewed Britain as being in the same league as Russia and America – sponsors and friends, but not members. This is the clearest sign that Churchill did not see Britain as being destined to be in any kind of United States of Europe, even if he did think it was a good idea for European countries like France and Germany.

Thus, it can be seen that whilst Churchill supported some kind of European structure, he did not necessarily mean the kind of structure that the EU grew into, and crucially, did not view Britain as being part of it, whatever it was. Even European Commissioner Jacques Delors conceded this. In France’s Le Monde in 2000, he remarked, “Even that great European, Winston Churchill, envisaged European integration only for the countries of the European continent, not for Britain”.

When I started university, many classmates shared stories of how they had spent their gaps years: teaching English in Kenya, backpacking across America and working in a bar in Thailand amongst the ones I remember clearest. One of my friends was nearly killed by the Bali bomb during his gap year travelling. No one mentioned Europe. Given a choice, our young people just don’t get excited by it. Given a choice between a holiday in Europe, and a holiday further afield, the young choose further afield. Our choice of emigration also shows this trend. The five countries where most British emigrants end up are Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Spain. The British emigrants who go to France and Spain are almost all retirees, whilst the emigrants who end up further afield are almost all young graduates.

So, what point am I making here? The point is, young people don’t find Europe even vaguely exciting or attractive. The older generation view it as they viewed it in their youth, mainly that it is the latest thing. The problem is it is this older generation which is now in charge of our country. The fifty and sixty somethings who are now government ministers still have the view of Europe they had in their youth, when Spain was the holiday of a lifetime. If Europe is still viewed by them as the latest thing, is it any wonder they are so emotionally invested in the EU? If Europe is the hip, trendy place they were taught in their youth, we must be as closely attached as possible to it now.

To them, Europe is the most exciting and trendy place ever. In 1970 something, when our leaders where in their formative years, it probably was. It is no coincidence that we joined the EU at a time Europe was seen as the future, during the 70s. The empire was gone, and there were no emerging economic powerhouses. India was a desperately poor third world country, and China was in the grip of a Stalinist ruling class, with sluggish growth. Europe was the only way to go in the 1970s. How things change. To my generation, the word China does not conjure up men in tunics carrying red books, it conjures up images of the dazzling lights of Shanghai

The website generational dynamics records an interesting trend: in the 2005 French votes on the European Constitution, the older you were, the more likely you were to vote Yes. Conversely, the younger you were, the more likely you were to vote No.  It would appear that it is not just British young people who have discovered that the world doesn’t start and end in Europe. The Europhile’s desperate cries of “There is no alternative to Europe!” obviously fell on deaf ears, when directed at young people who knew all to well that there most certainly is.

We can thus explain two things – our leaders obsession with Europe, and our young people’s disinterest in it. This means that we must focus our recruitment on the younger generation, who do not have the emotional attachment to the EU some older people have. We need to get out of Europe and back into the world.

Cameron’s actions leave no doubt as to his Europhilia. Days after becoming Conservative leader, he told of his desire to work with the EU Commission on climate change. He stated that no prospective candidate who signed the Better Off Out declaration would be allowed to stand as a candidate. Existing MPs who had signed it would be barred from front bench positions. Arch Europhile Ken Clarke was promoted to the front bench. Could Cameron’s Conservatives be any clearer?

In the North West of England, at least two of the three elected Conservative MEPs were vocal Europhiles. Sajjad Karim told the BBC he was “deeply committed” to Britain’s membership of the EU. Lead candidate Robert Atkins was warmly accepted an invitation to the rabidly pro-EU European Movement event in Lancaster. This is an organisation which vocally pushes for a European superstate.

One thing that struck me in the North West was that the lower down the Conservative list you went, the more Eurosceptic the candidates sounded. What infuriated me was that the Eurosceptic base did the hard work that got their Europhile MEPs elected. This seemed very unjust at a philosophical level. However, it is the reality of the modern Conservative party. Namely, the Eurosceptic base do all the donkey work of leafleting and fund raising, whilst the Europhile leadership reap the electoral benefits. The Conservative Party is split across the middle, and as long as the “legs” of the Conservative Party are Eurosceptic but keep working for the Europhile “head”, then it will remain so.

However, if and when the Eurosceptic base finally wake up to their party’s true stance on the EU, they will issue that leadership with an ultimatum – become Eurosceptic, or watch us go to a party that is. It remains to be seen whether the Conservative Party could survive such an ultimatum, but as the base becomes increasingly Eurosceptic in the face of its defiantly Europhile leadership, there are tensions there which UKIP can exploit. All we need to do is point out the true nature of this “split across the middle” rather than “split down the middle” set up, for as long as Conservative grassroots members believe their party is evenly divided, they will labour in vain.

This story best sums up my view of the European “Social Model”. That is, it worked for the time it was set up, but is outdated for the demands of this century. The social model made sense in the 1950s. The average family had a large number of children, so there was always a constant supply of new workers being pumped (forgive the expression) into the workforce. However, the last quarter of the last century saw birth rates contract and shrivel painfully. In countries like Italy and Germany, the average woman has just 1.2 children per family. Since you can’t have 0.2 of a child, rounding off tells us they have just one child. Two people, producing one replacement, equals a short fall of one worker to make up for the two parents when they retire.

Let us use an analogy. Imagine your economy is like a bus being pushed by people. The people on the bus represent your economically inactive people, and the people pushing the bus are your workers. Imagine five retired workers are on a bus, being pushed by 20 workers. Now imagine how they will fare if there are only 10 workers. Now imagine if there are only five. This will happen, and is happening, as the number of workers decreases at the same time the number of retirees is increasing. The baby boomers are now at, or rapidly approaching, retirement age. This will see record numbers of people becoming economically inactive pensioners, in need of state economic support via pensions and welfare. Can European countries afford it, and if they can’t, what will that mean for the EU?

European countries have told their populations for years that their “social model” is the envy of the world, and theirs by right. What will happen politically if and when the European governments have to admit they are wrong?

There are only three ways the EU can avoid this coming collapse. The first is to urge women to have more children. This is highly unlikely to happen. The second thing is to bring in immigrants from outside Europe to make up for the shortfall in workers caused by low birth rates. But this too, is unlikely. Populations are unlikely to accept even higher levels of mass immigration.  The third and final solution, is for the social model to be reviewed.

To say this would provoke a reaction is an understatement. Continental Europe routinely sees strikes and demonstrations in response to even very muted and sober calls for welfare and pension reform. It is not unknown for these strikes to be violent. During the strike itself, economic life comes to a standstill.

I am less concerned with what is needed to halt this crisis, as I am with what the political ramifications are for Europe when it comes. The potential economic damage it will cause could shatter first the Euro, and then the EU itself. This is food for thought for all Eurosceptics.