Now, while John Redwood may be a ‘eurosceptic’ in your opinion; as Peter Hitchens rightly pointed out the other day:

The word ‘Eurosceptic’ means ‘a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government’. This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don’t like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised.

I think that John Redwood is entirely wrong when he says that we could ‘renegotiate’ our position with the EU. (I should add in here that there is in fact a difference between wishing to withdraw from the EU – as I do – and wishing to ‘renegotiate’ British membership.)

For Britain to negotiate with the EU would require political will and a position of power. Currently we have neither, and even if we had the former we would still not necessarily have the latter, especially if we were basing this scenario on John Redwood being in charge, or someone else with similar views – Ruth Lea of Global Vision for example (more on her later).

To obtain a position of power in order to negotiate with the EU we would require some form of bargaining chip – without which the EU would simply laugh at our demands and carry on their merry ‘ever closer union’ way.

I think this point needs explaining a little bit further. The EU has no reason to agree to ‘renegotiate’ our terms of membership. Why would the EU and its supporters agree to break up the political union that they have spent over half a century creating just because one nation (Britain) wishes to ‘trade’ rather than burden itself with European political union?

It is a situation that is in some ways similar to that of Morgan Tsvangirai trying to negotiate with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The power rests with Mugabe and he has no reason to give it up. The only reason he has opened ‘negotiations’ recently (incidentally these negotiations are just a facade to give the appearance of the two working together to the international community – they will not transfer any real power,) with Tsvangirai is that he is facing massive worldwide condemnation.

The European Union would however be under no international pressure to ‘negotiate’ with Britain should someone leading this country come along with the intention of even wanting to doing so.

Regarding again Global Vision and Ruth Lea, I think that the comments made by Richard North this time last year still ring very true:

We have always regarded [Ruth] as ‘one of us’, so we tend to be polite about her on this blog, but her initiative today simply parades her own ignorance and demonstrates how far the Eurosceptic movement has to go before it even begins to understand the enemy it is dealing with.

Writes dear Ruth, ‘the EEC has been transformed from a customs union ‘with ambitions’ into a would-be ‘country called Europe’, somehow missing the point that the whole ethos of the ‘project’ was to employ economic integration as a means of achieving political integration. Thus, there has been no ‘transformation’ – the one was always intended to beget the other.

Anyway, as I was saying, we currently have no bargaining chip to use against the EU. The only bargaining chip we could possibly use against the EU is the threat of leaving – and to make this a real threat rather than empty posturing or calling their bluff we would have to mean it and back it up, ie. with the actual possibility of leaving, which John Redwood etc have publicly said they do not want to do.

But then, why bother attempting to negotiate with an organisation that will do their very best to stop you having anything your own way? Why not just leave and allow people in this country to freely decide the direction they want to pursue for themselves?

I should also say that Better Off Out is a campaign run by the Freedom Association of which John Redwood and a number of other MPs on the list of Global Vision supporters are members. If Better Off Out were not a serious campaign as you suggest then David Cameron would not have taken the extraordinary measure to ban all Conservative MPs and candidates from signing it, and promising that no current signatory of the campaign could join his Shadow Cabinet.

I think that really we all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet. If we cannot even decide amongst ourselves what the best course of action is then we will continue to fail – which is why the ‘eurosceptic’ or anti-EU movement in this country does not actually get anywhere and why we are always out manoeuvred by the Europhiles; because we cannot collectively decide on a position to pursue.

Ruth Lea, like John Redwood is deluded in thinking that we could negotiate our way out of this one. We must leave. It is the only way.

Many MPs share John Redwood’s views on Europe but choose not to join the Bruges Group or Better off Out as they consider them to be not very serious organisations.

Far better to put your support behind an organisation like Open Europe or Global Vision – an organisation that makes the positive case for a UK outside the EU.

Look at the business leaders that support Global Vision and also look at the MPs who support them (note one of them is John Redwood).