A FEW weeks ago I popped into the headquarters of the Taxpayers' Alliance to catch up with the leaders of that excellent campaigning organisation. Along with Sir Andrew Green's Migration Watch, the TPA has done more than any other organisation (including the Conservative Party) to expose the dishonesty and incompetence of the Labour Government.
I congratulated the TPA leaders for shifting the public spending agenda to focus on the monumental waste in public-sector budgets instead of the constant call for more "investment". They in turn noted that the Daily Express had been the first newspaper to champion their cause.
Once such pleasantries had been exchanged we talked about Europe. I noted that the TPA was opening a new front highlighting the staggering financial cost of Britain's membership of the European Union.
One of its senior figures then said something I found very surprising. He reckoned that it would now be possible to win a referendum on taking Britain out of the EU altogether.
I doubted it and told him so. Certainly a referendum against transferring any more power to Brussels would be won, I agreed - that was why it was being withheld by the political class. But the British were a pragmatic bunch and would surely view the prospect of being cut adrift from the EU altogether as an extreme proposition, which was why the most cravenly pro-Brussels party of all, the Lib Dems, were proposing an "in or out" plebiscite.
The TPA assured me that detailed polling research they had studied - and they are good at this stuff - indicated this was not the case. The stock of the EU had fallen so low and the costs of membership risen so high that a majority of the British public would now vote to leave.
Since that meeting we have had the debacle of the second Irish referendum, the cross-Europe ratification of Lisbon, the capitulation of David Cameron and now the appointment of the EU's first President and Foreign Secretary.
Anti-EU sentiment in Britain is deeper and broader than ever, embracing for the first time in many y ears lots of people with Centre-Left views.
THE EU elite has appointed a political Papa Smurf to the former job and a mediocre quango queen with a Bug's Bunny grin to the latter. Rumours that the new European anthem Herman Van Rompuy wishes to impose is the Smurf Song ("where are you all coming from? /from Smurfland where we belong") have thus far proved impossible to verify but he is clearly a figure whose pretensions to represent Britain in any capacity whatever are ridiculous.
Increasingly Cameron's decision to drop his implacable hostility to Lisbon looks like a mistake. One must remember that the TPA is an early spotter of trends and also possesses the boldness to lead public opinion. Cameron has tended to struggle to keep pace with it.
He was very slow to renounce his pledge to match Labour's excessive spending, slow to stop hugging hoodies and catch the public mood for tougher sentencing and slow to understand that being sceptical about mass immigration did not constitute a lurch to the Right but a retrieval of common sense. The suspicion must be that Cameron and his inner-circle are so traumatised by witnessing three Tory defeats at the hands of Tony Blair that deep down they believe only a Blairite policy agenda can win the next election.
But things have changed. Public opinion has moved on crime, tax and immigration. And it has also moved on Europe. Even the BBC is having to amend its long-term "progressive" bias on some of these issues.
So Cameron's Tories are in danger of missing the powerful current of Euroscepticism flowing through Britain. The TPA, and UKIP's Lord Pearson too are very convincing about why leaving the EU would help rather than hinder Britain's economy.
We import far more from them than they import from us. It is massively in Europe's interest to reach a free trade deal with Britain.
The undemocratic imposition of the Lisbon Treaty is one of three great betrayals of the British public by the political class this century. The other two are entering a disastrous war in Iraq on a false prospectus and the snouts-in-the-trough MPs' expenses racket.
Ours is a sick political culture in desperate need of renewal. Increasingly it appears that departing from the EU is a pre-condition for democratic revival. Only if we take such a step will we be able to regain control of our borders and cut ourselves free of the thicket of international laws and conventions forcing us to elevate the rights of criminals and failed asylum seekers above those of law-abiding citizens.
David Cameron has made his call on Europe: better off putting up with it. But it looks like the British public are reaching a different view: better off out.
