If I had to pinpoint the moment that the European Union started to irritate me, it wouldn't be the ERM debacle, or the Maastricht treaty, or the Brussels functionary who decreed bananas had to be straight, if indeed he ever did. And it certainly wouldn't be the arrival of Czech au pairs or Latvian waitresses, because what's not to like about Czech au pairs and Latvian waitresses? And it wouldn't even be studying Giscard d'Estaing's face and knowing in my bones he represented everything I disliked in a man.

The moment my opinion of the EU turned from indifference to suspicion was when I first re-entered Britain from abroad to find there was no separate queue for British nationals. Instead, we'd been lumped in with all other EU passport holders. This felt, deeply, atavistically, unmitigatedly wrong.

It still does. I arrived in London after one hour's sleep on an overnight flight last week. But it wasn't fatigue that caused my annoyance at the rediscovery that yes, my country is still trying to persuade me I'm a European Union National. And I just don't feel like I am a European Union National. Sorry.

Why does it matter? Because I was coming home and the French teenagers, Dutch holidaymakers and Italian businessmen were not. I'm all for Dutch holidaymakers and Italian businessmen (not so sure about French teenagers) but they were passing through, in the way I pass through Paris, Amsterdam or Milan. The arrival meant something different, something more, to me than it did to them, and I wanted this to be acknowledged, just as I would want my arrival at Orly or Schiphol or Malpensa to be acknowledged were I French or Dutch or Italian. Just as American officials say “welcome home” to US passport holders at JFK.

I also wanted to share the sensation of returning to home soil, even if the soil is the bland grey carpet of an endless Heathrow corridor, and I could not. Catching a countryman's eye at immigration used to be one of life's pleasures, used to be one of the acts that bound us together as a nation. At the moment of homecoming, you have more in common with the British person least like yourself than with the another European most like you. It would benefit national solidarity considerably were we able to express this commonality.

A love of the familiar and the secure is a harmless emotion; benign, and yet powerful. When the State seeks to realign such an emotion, to redefine home, to reattach loyalty to some other entity, resentment ensues. A minority of Europeans may feel equally at home in Barcelona or Birmingham, Munich or Manchester, but the deracination of the international political and business class should not dictate allegiances to the rest of us. What is it, Gordon Brown keeps asking, to be British? In what ways can British identity be fostered? Well, this is one such way. We love to queue: as compatriots coming home, we should be allowed to queue together.

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