I am not one of those people who regard "cost" as something which can only be measured on a balance sheet. There are other costs of the EU, which are just as important but which cannot be found in any financial account. These are: our self-government; our national identity; and our national pride. Let me address all 4 areas.

THE FINANCIAL COSTS
Looking at this issue, one must look back to the time when we joined the EU, or the EEC as it was then, when the main promise was a bright economic future based on the German economic model. We were witnessing the resurgence of the German economy - the "German miracle" - seen from the UK perspective of a strike-torn country, riddled with political dissent, poor management, lack of investment, inefficient public services and decaying infrastructures. Altogether, we looked at what we had, and looked across the Channel. We saw a "land of milk and honey" and wanted a slice of the action.

However, that great promise has never materialised. Instead of "milk and honey" we got regulation, more regulation and even more regulation. We got a massive trade deficit with the rest of what became the EU. And we paid through the nose in membership fees - for a club, the membership rules of which were forever changing.

Regards regulation, it is estimated that over 80% of our administrative law – the nuts and bolts legislation which governs the detailed conduct of our productive sector – now comes from the EU. That amounts to over 30,000 Regulations and Directives but, if you include the Decisions and Guidelines and all the other outpourings of the EU which have a legislative effect, the true total may be closer to 80,000. The fact is, that no-one really knows how much legislation has poured across the channel.

Nor indeed does anyone really know how much this legislation has cost British business. The Institute of Directors has estimated the cost at £15-25 billion a year, but that is only a guess. Certain costs, of course, can be more accurately estimated. For instance, the value of the fish handed to other nations under the Common Fisheries Policy approaches £5 billion a year. Taking these two figures, a case can be made that EU regulation costs us a minimum of £30 billion a year.

However, nothing is that simple. What is widely acknowledged is that British civil servants and officials have a peculiar genius for taking EU Directives and Regulations and magnifying their effect, making compliance more difficult and costly. It's difficult to the point of being impossible to separate the direct costs of compliance with EU Regulations, per se, from those arising from over-enthusiastic enforcement.

So saying - despite the IoD's estimate - actual costs of compliance could be much more than £30 billion. But they could be much less - owing to the unique flexibility and adaptability of British businessmen. When one opportunity is closed down, our entrepreneurs have a widely admired ability to open up others. The inventiveness and the resourcefulness of our business community is a model for the rest of the world. However, for the moment, let us stick to £30 billion and move on - although I will return to the subject of regulation.

More easy to quantify is the effect of membership of the EU on our balance of trade. It cannot be said enough times that, before our entry into the EEC, we had a net surplus with what are now our trading partners. Since entry, however, we have accumulated a net deficit of £175 billion, while remaining in surplus with the rest of the world, including Japan. We have to work that much harder in our global trading enterprises just to compensate for our membership of the EU, in which context it has to be said that the Single Market has been a great success - but not for is. It is our EU trading "partners" who have reaped the benefits.

Thus, when the other side claim that our departure from the EU - may that day come soon - would cost three million jobs, they are only looking at one side of the equation. They are looking only at the jobs arising from the export of goods and services to the EU. They are not looking at the jobs lost through imports. Neither do they take into account the fact that, if the EU closed its markets to our goods, we would do likewise, giving us a net increase in employment arising from import substitution. On any measure, the single Market has cost us jobs and money.

Then there is the third issue - our membership fees. Since joining, we have paid over £130 billion to the fund and, in the last year for which our contribution was declared, we paid £11 billion. Of that latter sum, we had returned to us some £5.5 billion so it works out that for every £1 we pay in we get 50p back.

Of course, the ranks of the Europhiles would discount the sums returned to us, to pay for things like Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, structural funds and the like, but that is rather like arguing that we only pay 5p in the pound income tax, because we benefit from goods and services provided by the government. Whichever way you look at it, however, the EU has taken out of our pockets the sum of £130 billion. Some we have got back - but only to spend on things we would not have chosen - an unquantifiable amount has been lost in fraud and waste. The rest has gone to subsidise the expansion of the project, not least the £850 million a year it costs to run the European Parliament from its two homes, one in Brussels and the other in Strasbourg.

THE LOSS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT
Under this heading, we must return to the matter of regulation. I have already mentioned that some 80 percent of our administrative law emanates from Brussels, over which our Parliament has no control. Furthermore, on matters which come within the jurisdiction or "competence" - as they like to call it - of Brussels, our government has no right whatsoever to legislate. This was made clear recently by the Minister of State for Agriculture, Joyce Quinn. She recently told an MP who was rash enough to promote a Private Bill requiring meat sold in British shops to bear labels identifying its origin, that this would be against EU law. Chillingly, she went on to describe it as "an abuse of Parliamentary process" even to propose such a law.

It has thus come to pass that our own MPs, who wish to make laws in the interests of our own citizens, are told that they are abusing the parliamentary process. As far as the majority of the work of British Parliamentarians now stand - our MPs and Peers - their single function is to act as a cypher, rubber-stamping EU law into the British law books. They may not alter, amend or in any way change the provisions which come from Brussels, otherwise the British government will find itself in the European Court of Justice, and British taxpayers will have to shell out millions of pounds in fines, against which there is no appeal.

Additionally, if they are so bold as to pass laws which, at the moment, do not conflict with EU law, at any time in the future should Brussels take an interest in the subject and pass laws, those laws automatically take precedence over ours, whether they be Acts of Parliament or merely Regulations. The writ of Brussels runs supreme. If we wish to stick with our own laws, we are back in the ECJ, as happened with the 1998 Merchant Shipping Act - which sought to protect our own fishermen from foreign owned boats - and the law is declared illegal. In addition to fines, we can also end up paying compensation to those who have been affected. Hence the government - that is, British taxpayers - are having to pay £100 million compensation to Spanish fishermen because we stopped them taking our fish.

But it is not only in terms of the minutia of internal regulation that we are affected. Much of our Foreign Policy interests are now dictated by Brussels. Our ability to go to war, to make treaties with other countries, our ability to make trade agreements and to sign international conventions, are all affected by our membership of the EU. How many people are aware, for instance, that in the last round of the WTO talks, British interests were represented by a Frenchman.

As things are developing, should we join the euro, we will lose our place on the G8, and already the EU has been casting covetous eyes on our UN place and our membership of the Security Council. The end point of our relationship with the EU is that we will, as a nation, have no more power or influence over our national destiny than a rate-capped council has on Westminster.

All of this, I can imagine, is not new to you all. For an audience of this nature, it is this situation which will have brought many of you here tonight. And no opportunity must be lost to tell the British nation what is going on. This need becomes all the more pressing because our own government, itself, seems reluctant to admit just how much power it has given away.

Take, for instance, the government's new "waste strategy". We are led to believe that, after a century or more where our waste disposal policies have centred on landfill - in which technology and experience we lead the world - we have suddenly taken it upon ourselves to abandon landfill and adopt a policy of incineration. Thus are we to suffer a rash of potentially polluting incinerators, one for each major town in the UK, with perfectly suitable holes in the ground going unused. What our government does not tell us however, is that the incineration policy is dictated by the Framework Directive on Waste, which requires limitations of landfill because, in so many continental countries, landfill is not a suitable option. Nowhere in the government's strategy document is there any mention of the EU. This is an example of "hidden Europe", which conceals the extent to which our politicians have handed over the nation to the EU. Nevertheless, the Europhiles would defend this position. We are not giving up our sovereignty - we are simply "pooling it", they say. Notwithstanding that sovereignty is like virginity - you either have it or you do not - there is a case to be made that, acting through the EU we have the power to influence issues of common concern, to a far greater extent that we can by acting on our own. Thus, while we give, for instance, Greece a say in the laws we must obey, we also have a say in the laws which apply to Greece and the other member states.

Even if this was a seriously defensible position, however, there are central flaws in it which cannot be overcome. Taking a broad view of democracy, one could say that there is nothing to stop any government - or supranational government - making stupid laws. We have plenty of experience of that and, it has to be acknowledged, compared with some of the amazing laws to come out of Westminster, some EU laws are a paragon of virtue.

But that is not the point. Churchill himself described democracy as the "least worst" system. But its great strength is in its accountability - the fact that, if we do not like what our politicians do, we can vote them out at the next election. That is the great safety valve, which has kept our nation free from violent revolution. But this safeguard does not apply within the EU. Once an EU law is in place, it is almost impossible to change it.

Thus we have the fresh meat directive, 91/497, which is progressively destroying the small and medium sectors of the meat industry. We have MPs and Ministers all agreeing that the law is outdated and causing unnecessary damage. We have scientific experts saying that the law actually causes more harm than good. And what do our ministers say? "My hands are tied". Because it is European law, no changes can be made until the majority of countries agree to put it on the agenda. Greece is no help. It is exempt from the directive. Insufficient countries are affected, so no rapid change is likely. British industry, in the interests of Community harmony, must pay the price.

Our politicians can do nothing but wring their hands - so ends nearly 1000 years of proud self-government.

THE LOSS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
We are the oldest nation state in the 15 which make up the EU and had centuries of history behind us before most of the states in Europe even existed. It is the case therefore that we have our own way of doing things, ways which also pre-date the existence of most of the European states. And because of our separate identity as a global trader, a sea power and leader of the largest empire in the history of mankind, our ways are very different from the often inwards-looking continental states which have become our "partners".

In many ways our systems and traditions are better than their European counterparts. In some few ways, they are worse. Mostly, they are just different. But the central ethos of the EU project is "harmonisation". This is a drive for commonality and, because our systems are so different from those in the rest of the Community, the drive for harmonisation inevitably means Britain losing its standards and adopting the mores of the land mass across the Channel.

No better example of this can be offered than the drive towards metrication, a system installed by Napoleon, arguably for no better reason than it was different from the system in the UK. In terms of facilitating trade, there is no problem for those companies who wish to export to produce goods described in metric, or even with dual markings. But since our export trade amounts to less than 12 percent of our economy - and a considerably smaller part of our national life - why is it that we are being forced to change? Our pounds, ounces, miles, feet and inches are part of who we are. I for one cannot begin to understand what 33 degrees Centigrade means, although if you tell me it is 91F I know exactly what you mean. It is hot!

Thus, for very real reasons of national identity, we supported Russell Duke, the butcher who preferred to sell sausages in pounds rather than kilograms, and so displayed another admirable British trait - a healthy disrespect for authority. We will support him even if the authorities believe his actions are illegal, because we know that is what the consumer wants.

But if metric is to become the focus of the battle, the real battle is over the hearts and minds of the political classes. There is a large section of the political elite which seems to hate the idea of Britishness. That same elite sees everything Continental as admirable, from their holidays in Tuscany, to their French wines and their German cars. European is good and British is bad. British is negative - European is positive. This elite is giving away our right to be British. What they are really trying to say to us is that it is somehow wrong to be British.

In our Parliamentary Group, the EDD - or Europe of Democracy and Diversity, we have four nations - French, Dutch, Danish and British - and we coexist harmoniously, each able to respect our national identities and differences. Harmonisation does not lead to harmony. Last week I had dinner in Strasbourg; our table was a gathering of French, British, Belgian and Flemish - in a Chinese restaurant, where the proprietor spoke French with a Chinese accent. We did not need harmonisation to relate to each other, or make ourselves understood!

We want the Germans to be German, the French to be French, and the British to be British. Vive la difference! What we don't want is to be broken up into 12 regions, each with their elected assemblies, with our Parliament relegated to the status of a heritage museum.

THE LOSS OF NATIONAL PRIDE
I see the loss of pride as one of the great unquantifiable costs. When a Minister of a great Department of State has to tell British citizens that he cannot relieve burdens created by European regulation, because "his hands are tied", that is nothing less than national humiliation.

That the British Minister of Agriculture must go running to Brussels to get permission to save British pig producers from bankruptcy - and not get it - is also humiliating.

That we have to go cap in hand to the EU to get permission to sell our beef to Botswana - and make our industry jump through hoops before we get grudging assent - is also humiliating.

That we are forced, by Brussels diktat, to change our driving licenses and adopt the national symbol of a ring of stars with the letters "UK" in the centre - where once we used the royal crown - is also humiliating.

The same goes for our having to forego the coveted blue passport. That we have to display the ring of stars, and an acknowledgement to the EU when they are so kind as to give us some of our money back to pay for structural fund projects, is also humiliating.

That we even have to beg for regional aid is also humiliating. That we have to go to Brussels with our begging bowl to get subsidies for Rover - and fail to do so - is humiliating. We are reduced to the role of supplicants. That is humiliating. They have stolen our pride.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
This is the cost of the EU. It is not just a matter of money. Even if there were unequivocal economic advantages to our membership of the EU, these would not be enough. Not if the price is our ability to govern ourselves, our national identity, and our national pride. Better to live in penury as a free man than in the lap of luxury as a slave.

But if what I have described is bad enough, the situation is about to get indescribably worse. On the near horizon is the Treaty of Nice, where the Commission is in a mad panic to finish the project. On the table is the abolition of our national veto in 39 more aspects of legislative competence, a plan to give the EU its own national identity, the creation of a "single judicial space" and further moves to develop the EU's own defence and foreign policy, with plans eventually to create a European army. There can be no doubt about it. The plan is to create a European superstate.

TIME TO MAKE OUR MINDS UP
Roy Jenkins, another of the great Europhiles, once said there are only two consistent positions with regard to the EU - "All in, or all out". I agree. Whatever Mr Hague and his Tories might say, there is no middle way. We cannot be "in Europe" and "not run by Europe". Furthermore, we cannot accept a position where we accept what we have already but draw a line at further integration. This is like asking a man up to his nose in quick sand to accept his position, as long as he sinks no further.

And as for the other fiction, we cannot seek renegotiation of the Treaties, to mould the EU to our own liking. Any changes in this direction would require unanimity and there is not even a glimmer of a chance that there would be even a majority in support of such changes.

For the UK to keep the pound is not enough. To draw the line at the pound is simply to create a new Maginot line - and we know what happened there. Looking around we see that Hong Kong has its own currency, yet is ruled by China. For independence, we need our own currency but retention of our own currency does not guarantee our freedoms.

What we need, therefore, is political will - and that is what we stand for. We are about withdrawal, because we believe the costs of membership of the EU are too high. All we need to do is repeal the European Communities Act and we are on our way back to becoming an independent nation.

We can emulate the free trade status of Norway or Switzerland, or even restore our own unique identity as a prosperous global trading nation. Whatever we chose, I can guarantee that we would get on better with the French and the Germans - and the rest of "Europe", if we were not forced together into this political project which is the EU.