An e-mail arrives in my in-box (from CommunicateResearch) reporting on another survey on Europe, this time of MPs at Westminster. 85 per cent of Liberal Democrat MPs supported a European constitution and the same percentage of Conservative MPs opposed it (we’ll come back to that). Among Labour MPs, support for a constitution runs at 58 per cent, with nearly a third opposed.

Another question asked was “Irrespective of its rejection, many key provisions of the EU constitution will be implemented anyway”. Well over half of MPs of all parties agreed with that statement, with around 15 per cent disagreeing. The commentary from the pollsters notes that this “supports the view of those who complain that the EU is undemocratic.” Well, actually, no it doesn’t.

First, many of the provisions in the constitution are actually either codifications of existing practice (as constitutional amendments often are) or easily introduced on the basis of the existing treaties already agreed by the member states. There is nothing undemocratic about implementing the law.

Secondly, the survey demonstrates the level of knowledge and/or opinion of MPs at Westminster. It is hardly proof of anything about the EU institutions themselves.

Returning to our Tories, it appears not to have occurred to them that the reason why there can be this unclarity on what might happen next is precisely because the European Union does not have a constitution. A set of rules, so we all know where we stand, is just what we need.

There is no reason why a clear and simple set of rules for how the EU should function should necessarily lead to more integration (if more integration is something you do not want to see). What it would do is make clear who does what. We pro-Europeans are confident that the more people know about the EU and what it is capable of, the more they will want to see it fulfilling those capabilities. That’s not to say it is perfect: the pro-European case has always been a reformist case, too.

The Single European Act was signed in Luxembourg on 17 February 2006. Who would have thought then what kind of European Union would lead to? The EU now has 25 members: back then, there were only 12. Those members include 8 countries that were then subject to Communist rule. Some of us pro-Europeans might have dreamed of such a development, but now it is reality.

Many of the things we now take for granted in daily life have only become possible because of the single market. The wide and growing range of foodstuffs in our shops, mobile phone roaming, budget airlines. Anyone who has ever flown Ryanair or Easyjet has the Single European Act to thank.

And what was it that made it possible to create the single market? A strong Commission, majority voting in the Council, and an increased role for the European Parliament. The success of the market cannot be distinguished from the success of the institutions. That was true then, it is true now, and it will be true in the future. To see why, think about the price of gas.

Gas prices are rising because of a range of factors including rising demand for commodities of all kinds in the emerging economies of south and east Asia and concern about the environmental implications of burning fossil fuels. Which of these was foreseeable 20 years ago?

There is also an attempt by Russia to exert influence over its neighbours, which was very familiar back then.

The way we can deal with these problems is by acting together through the European Union. A report published by Ofgem suggests that tough action on competition could bring UK gas bills down by up to £3 billion a year. That turns out to be the same as we pay to the European Union budget. Effective enforcement of competition policy could see the EU pay for itself, even before we look at the other benefits. We could also negotiate collectively with the Russians to get the best deal on gas, rather than each member state try to bargain on its own.

However, we can only get these benefits if the institutions are able to act effectively. If the Eurosceptics had their way, the EU system would be weakened and unable to act.

The lesson is clear: only if we can act together within an effective European Union can we get the results we need.

A debate this evening with Gerard Batten, a UKIP MEP for London. On the whole it went quite well (you can read my opening remarks here). One thing that was raised and which I didn’t get a chance to respond to (lack of time) was a statement about the sheer cost of EU membership. £11.5 billion a year at the moment in cash, plus a further £30-40 billion in indirect costs.

What do these numbers represent? The first number might represent the gross payment to the EU, not the net figure (i.e. only the money paid to the EU and not the money the EU pays back). So receipts by UK farmers, for example, are disregarded, which might surprise the farmers themselves. Similarly, structural funds provided by the EU to the poorest regions such as Cornwall and South Yorkshire also disappear. And all the grants for training and innovation, energy efficiency and organic conversion. In the opinion of UKIP, all that stops.

I can write that with confidence because their election manifesto in the general election last year said so. They wanted to take all the money and spend it on increasing pensions. Now, that’s a fine way to use public money, I’m sure, but they ought to be more honest about what they would cut. That’s what comes of using the gross figure and not the net.

The indirect costs are also worth identifying, too. The figure comes from an estimate published in the Netherlands that EU regulation “cost” about 2 per cent of national GDP (about £20 billion), plus the supposed increased cost of food under the CAP (another £10 billion or so) and some other extra expenses. (Philippe Legrain, when he was working for the Britain in Europe campaign, produced an excellent analysis of the claim: I’ll see if I can find it posted on the web somewhere.)

The cost of regulation is a stark one. What are those regulations that are costing us £20 billion a year from which UKIP would save us? One is the regulation that requires food companies to maintain hygienic premises. Another is the requirement to put an ingredients list on the label so the consumer can know what he or she is eating. A third means that restaurants and food manufacturers have to keep records of where they bought their ingredients from so that, if there is a contamination or a scare of some sort, the source of it can be traced and other restaurants and food manufacturers can be warned if necessary. If UKIP’s promises are to be kept, all that regulation has to be scrapped. The bad old days of food poisoning and adulteration could be on the way back. That’s not my preferred vision of the future.

Another example – I’ll stop with this one – is the equal right to pensions that women enjoy in the UK. That wasn’t a decision taken in Westminster, but a decision imposed by the European Court. The Treaty of Rome, the signature on which was a decision taken in Westminster, included a provision for the equal treatment of men and women at work, which the ECJ interpreted as a commitment to equal pension rights. Female readers of this blog might stop to think that their equality in the workplace is, in the eyes of UKIP, an excessive burden from which we should be liberated. It shows that what goes on in the EU is not merely an international issue but of local and immediate significance, too.

Robert Newman used to be funny. Now he’s just laughable. No, I don’t mean that, that’s not fair, there is more to his argument than meets the eye. (He had a piece in The Guardian last Thursday, “It’s capitalism or a habitable planet – you can’t have both” – read it here.)

He writes that capitalism is based on “infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet.” This makes it “not sustainable by its very nature.” Well, hang on. There are several problems here.

First, a market that is continually expanding might not be infinitely expanding – it might be getting ever closer to a maximum limit without ever actually reaching it.

Secondly, and more seriously, there is nothing that requires capitalism to require more and more materials. Think about the market for land in the UK. It isn’t growing all the time. Capitalism hasn’t created a new county, north of Norfolk, say. There is a finite amount of land on our island and, as demand increases, the price goes up.

The crucial point is that market forces are just as suited to getting the most out of limited resources as they are at exploiting limitless ones. They reward efficiency and discourage waste. It is no accident that industrial processes in capitalist countries are more energy efficient than their equivalent in former socialist countries where energy is much cheaper.

Think of all the fuss recently about the increase in Ukrainian gas prices. That’s because the price mechanism is slowly being brought into play there, rather than prices remaining unrealistically low. Under capitalism, that’s what one would expect.

There are problems caused by the modern economy, certainly, but they are the result of the lack of modern economic regulation, not its presence. The point is that there are externalities – costs to others – which are not factored into the cost of production. These fall into two types.

The first type are those which are simply exported. For example, Japan was one of the first countries to introduce forestry protection (from around 1700, according to Jared Diamond) and to this day remains the most heavily forested of any major industrialised country. However, Japan is also the world’s largest importer of timber and demand from Japan is ultimately responsible for much of the deforestation in south east Asia. Japan has not solved its forestry problem, merely dumped it somewhere else.

The second type are problems which are intangible, such as the emission of greenhouse gases. Like the first category of problem, they amount to the dumping of a problem on someone else, but unlike the first category there is not an immediate regulatory solution at national level. Increasing the cost of energy for industry in one country – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions there – might simply lead to the migration of industrial production to other countries where the cost of energy remained lower. This is the waterbed effect: press down in one place and there will be a bulge somewhere else/

What is necessary is that regulation can be applied internationally, not nationally. The fact that it isn’t, that is the problem, not capitalism.

Rather than thinking that we live under capitalism, it is better to think of capitalism regulated by liberal democracy. The problem that Robert Newman has identified is not caused by capitalism as such, but rather because liberal democracy is increasingly unable to regulate it properly.

Liberal democracy itself is organised principally at a national level, while both capitalism and the problems it causes have gone global. The social change that Robert Newman argues for should not be in the nature of capitalism but in the national nature of the liberal democracy that regulates it. That’s the argument that has to be won, and that’s no laughing matter.

More on Tony Blair’s speech in Oxford last Thursday (which you can read here). He declares that:

"The vision is the one I share with Europe's founders: an ever closer union of nation states, cooperating, as of sovereign right, where it is in their interest to do so. I don't support ever closer union for the sake of it; but precisely because, in the world in which we live, it will be the only way of advancing our national interest effectively.”

Was this really the vision of the founders, a friend asks. The Schuman declaration, after all, speaks of the aim of world peace and explicitly mentions the role of the United Nations. (Read the Schuman declaration here.) This is rather different to the advancement of national interests as a sovereign right.

However, this speech would have attracted entirely different headlines if it had mentioned the role of the United Nations in the prevention of war. It is worth re-reading the sentence “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.” and thinking back to how much time the WMD inspectors were given in Iraq.

I think it is better to look forward rather than backward. After all, this is one of the main themes of the speech: that the reasons for developing the EU are no longer the same as those for creating it in the first place. The sentence that follows the first Blair quote captures it perfectly:

“The nature of globalisation; the emergence of China and India; the fact that no European country will in time be large or powerful enough to be a major power on its own: all of this means, to me, that the nations which do well will be the ones that build the strongest alliances."

This is the point. It will be impossible for Britain, or any other European country, to make the most of the future if it is at the same time making two fingers at its closest friends and allies. Peace in Europe may be a fact, but it is no longer persuasive. Memories are short: the future is longer.

Compare what Blair said with Gordon Brown’s speech to the Fabian Society on 14 January (which you can read here):

“by taking the right long term decisions Britain can stand alongside China, India and America as one of the great success stories of the next global era.”

This is the alternative, that Britain seeks to be a power in the world independently of the rest of Europe. As a policy, it worked in the 19th century but was clearly out of date two decades into the 20th. It seems to me to make no sense that it can make a comeback in the 21st.

To return to the founding fathers, the reason why the European Union has lasted is because (1) it is based on effective institutions rather than temporary political understandings among the member states and (2) those institutions were able to deliver solutions to common problems. Monnet, Schuman and the others understood this, and it remains the case. The challenge for the EU is to defend those institutions while reshaping them to deal with today’s problems. While I would be happier if the prime minister had spelled this out more explicitly, at least we have something to work with.

William Hague, Conservative shadow foreign secretary, went on a mission to the European Parliament earlier this week looking for partners with whom to form a new centre-right, Eurosceptic political grouping. If he can find them, he then hopes to persuade his own party’s MEPs to join it. It is a mission fraught with difficulty.

First, there is no credible centre-right alternative to the current Christian Democrats. They vary in tone and nature quite a lot from one country to another, but that’s because each country has a different kind of politics and the same party cannot exist everywhere. Nevertheless, they get on as a group in the European Parliament because of the basic ideas they have in common. A liking for political influence is one of those ideas and belief that it matters is another. How many of them are likely to prefer to join a group with the British Tories?

The right of centre groups other than the Christian Democrats look to be unpromising partners. (I nearly started the previous sentence with the phrase “centre right” but that would be quite wrong.) Would the Conservatives really prefer to share a group with the Polish Law and Justice party that opposes gay rights and proposed closing down the Women’s Committee in the European Parliament? Or the Dutch party that refuses to allow women to become MEPs? Is that really preferable to the German CDU or the French UMP? If so, David Cameron is giving himself quite a lot of explaining to do. It would be a novel definition of modernisation.

The simple fact is, as Tony Blair remarked in his speech today (which you can read here), that support for the EU on the basis of sharing sovereignty really is the mainstream position in Europe. If the British Tories choose to sit outside it, they will not find many partners.

They will not even find much support among their own MEPs. This is the second problem. The terms of their membership of the EPP-ED group do not commit them to support the federalist positions of the Christian Democrats with which they disagree. Many of the grounds of William Hague’s objections turn out to be fictional. I suspect that, given a decent interval, the campaign to create a new group in the European Parliament will be quietly forgotten. Already, the briefings are warning of how complicated it is and how long it will take. That’s how quiet forgetfulness always starts.

This blog avoids taking a party political position, but it can’t make sense for the largest group of British MEPs deliberately to walk off into the twilight. The EPP-ED group affords them positions of influence on committees and in delegations that a splinter group would never offer. I suppose, in the minds of the advocates of a breakaway, influence in the EP isn’t really that important. If your central political proposition is that the European institutions should be weaker rather than stronger, you are not afraid of weakness within them yourself.

No, the puzzle is not why anti-European Tory MEPs are arguing for this policy, but why the Westminster leadership is going along with them.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith voiced support for the idea that UK law should always be superior to European law (i.e. that Britain should leave the EU) but his successor Michael Howard made it clear that he disagreed. EU membership was a settled and accepted fact. The mystery then is why the new strategy and positioning of the Tory party on Europe is being guided by MEPs such as Daniel Hannan and Roger Helmer who disagree with its European policy. When William Hague returns from Brussels, perhaps he can explain.