POLITICIANS would do well to heed the wisdom offered to trainee lawyers: never ask a question if you’re not sure what the answer will be. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, made this mistake on Monday when delivering the Hugo Young Memorial Lecture.

He asked whether we British would prefer to be, with respect to the EU, driving from the centre or “sulking from the periphery”, as though those were the only two alternatives. A third possible response, involving a quick goodbye and a return to independence, would probably rather shock him, although he did very kindly state that the choice is ours.

Senhor Barroso went on to insist that the benefits of our EU membership far outweigh the disadvantages. Economists have a technique to decide such questions, called a cost-benefit analysis. It’s not all that complicated an idea: you add up all the costs, add up all the benefits, and if the latter is higher than the former then you say it’s a good thing; if not, a bad thing to do. However, where these economist types are really awkward is that they insist upon looking at the actual numbers.

As an example, look at the single market programme (SMP), supposedly the great economic success of recent decades. Gunter Verhuegen, the EU Enterprise Commissioner, admitted on Monday last week that the bureaucratic costs to business of complying with EU regulation, almost all of which is to do with the SMP, is some €600 billion a year.

In the 2004 version of the same report the Commission noted that such regulations are often justified in terms of increasing product quality or reducing pollution — and then it quotes approvingly from an academic paper: “(The empirical) results are broadly consistent with the public choice theory that sees regulation as a mechanism to create rents (perverse incentives) for politicians and the firms they support.”

The Commission has also noted that the benefits of the SMP have been substantial, an addition of some €164.5 billion a year to the GDP of the countries within the Union.

Losing €600 billion to get €164.5 billion back in order that the politicians can enjoy and exercise their power is not one of those answers that passes such a cost-benefit analysis.

Which leaves us with the only important question out there. Can we leave yet?