 We're about to choose how we want to live our lives. This is the single most important political decision any of us will make in our lifetime. It's been more than 40 years since we were last asked. It could be a half century before we're asked again, if we're asked at all. I think this is the last chance that we'll be able to vote on EU membership when we still have a recognisable identity as Britons. And what makes it scary is that if we go the wrong way, we're in it for, certainly, my lifetime and probably my kid's lifetime. I'm on my way to Brussels to better understand the deal that's on offer. This is about our ability to say to ourselves that we are a genuinely democratic and free people. That's how important this is. In return for our democratic rights, we've been promised prosperity and security. Are these promises convincing? The choice before us is all about democracy and how highly we value it. The word democracy comes from the ancient Greek. The demos is the people. The people are meant to be in charge, not politicians or bureaucrats. They're meant to serve us, not rule us. We have given them some power, but only temporarily and we can take it away from them if they displease us. That's the theory. The EU, if you will, please. Straight off, there's a snag. On my quest to understand the EU, my first challenge is to find it. There are over 90 EU buildings here in Brussels and a load more in Strasbourg and Luxembourg. As impressive as the modernist buildings is the number of directorates, councils, commissions and ministries which occupy them. But here, the EU slips its first cog, for a democracy to function, there needs to be transparency. We, the people, need to know how the system works. People might not understand exactly how the functions of the British constitution work, but they get the gist of it. Once every five years, we go down the school hall or to a church, we put a cross in a ballot paper, they're all counted up and the chat with the most folks wins. We get that. You try working out how a European commissioner is appointed. It's positively calf caress. You can't actually get your head around who does what, why and who is answerable to who. The European Union, which imposes laws on 28 countries, is made up of seven main institutions, which include the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Commission and the European Parliament. Do you know the difference between the European Council, the Council of the European Union and the Council of Europe? It's a very good question. Tell me how many presidents there are in the European Union. How many presidents? I'd guess at one. There's two presidents, for goodness' sake. I don't know what the difference between the two presidents is. There's four presidents, you say? There are squads of committees and presidents of this and commissioners of that. The expression I really hate is pooled sovereignty. It's bollocks. The people of Slovenia have no more idea than the people of the UK and the people of Sweden or the people of Spain what in fact is going on. I wouldn't profess to understand the detail of how it all works and I think part of that is deliberate. One side knows, one side is a priesthood and knows how it all works and the rest of us ordinary citizens don't know how it works. The massive transfer of power takes place. It was devised to make sure that the great mass of the people could not control government ever again. Problem number two, for a democracy to function, you need to know who's running it. A democracy only works if you know who your representatives are. David Cameron, Toph tries to hide it. Probably quite a nasty piece of work. Tony Blair, oily. There's only room for one in the lifeboat, Tony Blair. The ordinary voter who's going to hand them all this power can make up their mind whether they like them, dislike them because they see them in the papers, they hear them on the radio, they watch them on the telly. Do you recognise this man? No. No. Do you recognise that man? No. I challenge you to name almost any of them. Do you recognise this guy? No. Was that chap Juncker? Is he one of them? I didn't know whether it was just the British being a bit thick so I thought I'd ask some folk in Brussels. Oh, yeah, yeah, sir. Martin. Martin. Martin, can you tell me who that is? I don't know. No, no, no. Who are all of these Eurocrats? Who are they answerable to? Ah, but here we come to problem number three, the accountability. Would it help if you knew who they were because you don't have any power over them, so what's the point? In the EU, there's a thing called a parliament, but it's not a parliament as we know it. In the EU, the parliament isn't in charge. If you ever know anyone, know who their MEP is, nobody does. It's because we know that they're not actually being voted into a meaningful position of lawmaking. This is the only parliament the world's ever invented where you cannot initiate legislation, propose legislation, or even the repeal of legislation. All of that comes from the Unelected European Commission. So you can't propose a law and try and get it passed? Absolutely not. Parliamentary democracy, once every five years, you can throw everything out of the window and start again. With this, once something is European law, there is nothing which would be a democratic process that voter can do to change it. The people whom we elect to go to Brussels have almost no power at all. They do what they're told. Got even less power than the House of Lords, for goodness sake. Our votes for these people are pointless. They are fundamentally pointless. The European Parliament's only relevance. The European Union bureaucratic structures who are appointed not elected have all the real power. The real power in the EU, including the power to legislate, resides not with the Parliament, but with EU officials. They debate their laws in secret. We are not allowed to hear or read their deliberations. Do you know the name of Britain as a European commissioner? No. Have you heard of Jonathan Hill? No. No. No. Did you vote for him? Did I vote for him? No. No. The curious thing is, only last year, we were celebrating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the founding charter of English freedom. The history of democracy in Britain has been the history of taxpayers demurding the right to determine themselves, how much tax should be taken from them and how it should be spent. If I am going to be asked to pay taxes, I want to be told where they're going, and if they're spent badly or stupidly, I want to be able to remove from power the people who are spending them. What made Britain rather different from most other countries was that in an early stage, we said no government could pass any law or impose any tax without first getting the authority of the British people. So it's a major thing that we can be taxed by other people without our say. We are now subjects of a vastly complex state machine run by anonymous officials whom we didn't elect, but who have the power to impose on us laws that we haven't debated and have no democratic means of repealing. People who say to you that the European Union is undemocratic, fundamentally misunderstand the European Union, it is anti-democratic. But do we, you officials and politicians, it's like a warm bath? It's like heaven for the politician or bureaucrat because it's power without accountability. The reason why all the major political parties are massively in favour of Europe is because when their careers are blown out of the water here, they're stumbling around for a job. No commercial organisation is going to hire them. They know what a collection of shits they are, right? There's only one place that will hire them. They can get a job there, which gives them the freedom not to have to face the electorate. It's extremely well-paid, it's more or less permanent, they don't have any constituents and they don't have any worry about being thrown out at elections. So they say, stay with the European project, I'll be making myself two, three hundred grand a year, it'll be fantastic and at the end of it I'll get a period, it's great.