 When Britain joined in 1973, we should have seen what was coming. When the documentation was brought in for signing, it took two strong men to carry it. Of a new and a greater united Europe. It soon became clear that the common market was so much more than a trade deal. Shiny new buildings kept appearing, the administration grew, and the price of membership kept going up as the EU assumed greater powers and demanded more money from member states. Inevitably, this burgeoning bureaucratic machine reflected the values of the university educated people who ran it and who benefited from its generous funding. Staying in the EU is the right kind of thing because it's what civilised, sophisticated people do. If you believe in the EU, you believe in the arts and arts funding. I think there is a mindset amongst the cultural and the political elite that their role on the planet is to direct the lives of the rest of us. They think that ordinary people need to be controlled and looked after. They think the world needs to be ordered from above and that they should be the ones doing the ordering. There's a tremendous snobbery built into the whole project. The idea that you are part of the elite which should decide how the little people live their lives. These people up here, the intellectuals, are looking down on the plebs and saying you aren't bright enough to decide the future of your country. As the EU's power steadily increased, so did the number of regulators and the volume of regulation. The bureaucratic class can find no area of human life that they don't want to write a rule book about. What vacuum cleaner you've got, where you get your hair cut, what kind of size your shoes are and those rule books stack up one on top of the other such that no reasonable human being could now possibly have an understanding of all the rules they need to obey. You've got thousands and thousands of bureaucrats, civil servants and administrators and their job is to push paper, write on paper, have rules on paper, pile up more and more paper. You just get a mass of growing telephone directory size rules and regulations one after the other, ceaselessly, endlessly. That is actually what the bureaucracy sees itself as there to do. If the list of EU rules could be put into one document today, it would take more than two men to carry it on. Such a document would reach as high as Nelson's column. Regulation is so vast and complex, even the EU is unable to tell us how many laws there are covering different areas of our lives. So we've used some helpful EU databases to make the best estimate we can. Here is regulated EU man waking from his regulated slumber to start his regulated day. You wouldn't think you'd need a law for pillowcases, but the EU has five. But that's nothing. The pillow inside is subject to 109 different EU laws. As far as we can tell, there are only 11 EU laws pertaining to radio alarm clocks. There's around 400 governing the other stuff on Joe's citizens' bedside table. You can't be too careful with duvets and sheets, so there's around 50 laws governing those. There are 65 laws governing bathrooms, but that doesn't include the contents. How they manage to think up 31 laws for toothbrushes is beyond me. But let's face it, toothpaste is a bit weird, so 47 laws sounds about right. Mirrors have been known to crack and get dirty, so they're covered by 172 laws. As for the shower, well, we've all seen psycho. Murdering girls like that is now strictly prohibited. Shampoo can get in your eyes and cause discomfort, 118 laws. EU bureaucrats seem terrified by towels for some reason, slightly more relaxed about radiators. There are 1,246 laws relating to bread, but just 52 covering the crazy anarchic toaster. Just 84 laws cover fridges, but an impressive 12,000 laws cover milk. After all, it might go off. Bowl, 99 laws. Spoon, more than 200 laws, same for the orange juice. But the coffee, whoa, stand back, grandma, this toxic jungle juice can keep you up all night. The best dog in Britain is unaware of the odourless fog of canine legislation, but careful ruby ignorance is no excuse. Our regulated man leaves his regulated house. There are only 92 laws about pavements, after all, they're just pavements, but you get the idea. EU regulations surround us like invisible barbed wire. When we're frustrated in our daily lives by needless, stupid EU laws, it's infuriating. But it's much worse than infuriating if you're thinking of starting a new business. It's like entering a legal minefield. The small and medium-sized businesses and start-ups, it's perilous. Complying with regulation imposes huge costs, and falling foul of regulation can put you out of business. Big established firms don't mind regulation so much. For a start, it means less competition. Big corporate interests tend to love the EU. It suits their purposes perfectly. All the corporations love the European Union because what it does, it creates the regulations which destroy their small arrivals. Big business loves regulation. Don't forget that. Big companies can lobby in Brussels, and no matter how money they spend, they're staggeringly large. One of the first things that stuns you are the number of invitations on your desk to lunch, breakfast, dinner, champagne receptions. And invariably, they come from lobby groups. There are people who make their entire livelihoods, make shouts of being professional lobbyists in Brussels. So a lot of the lobbying goes on. So you will see the lobbyists from different companies, from NGOs. The returns they get by stifling competition and framing regulations in a way which suits them and keeps other people out is very, very striking. It used to be called a rich man's club, and that is by and large what it is.