PPR: I am not a politician. I am not a lawyer. I don't know the details. I will give you one example though. When we were young, we used to swim at Scarborough — you probably swam at Scarborough — and from the beach you could see a huge sewer spewing out raw sewage into the sea very close to the place where people were bathing. And that is something that continued in England until the EU said: you've got to clean up your beaches. They have got some programme that is called Blue Flag Beaches, and now thanks to the EU, Britain has been forced to clean up its beaches, and I think small things like that show how excellent the EU has been for the people of Britain.

DH-A: Self-governing countries make their own advances, and I'd like to think that we would have cleaned up the beaches anyway. I have a maritime constituency and I want clean beaches too or I won't be re-elected. But the EU has become something different — it has become a law-making agency, the purveyor of rights, the spender of other people's money, and eventually nation states will be reduced to paying the unemployed and burying the dead. That is not my idea of a democratic continent.

PPR: All governments spend other people's money. The UN spends other people's money — all those international organisations — Nato spends other people's money. So you can't just single out the EU for that. I think you would agree on the principle of subsidiarity. I would certainly agree that anything that can be done by a smaller unit of government should be done by a smaller unit of government. And only those things that can only be done by a larger unit of government should be done by the larger unit of government.

DH-A: I believe that is derived from Catholic theology.

PPR: Catholic social teaching, yes.

DH-A: I put it to you, Jay, as a good Catholic, that you are temperamentally suited to submitting to a foreign authority, while I, as an angular dissenting Protestant, have a greater instinct for self-determination.

PPR: We come back to discussions we have had before. I am a Thomas More man, and I think Charles V was a wonderful emperor who, if he'd had his way, would have done a great deal of good for England, if he had united Europe in the Holy Roman Empire. Whereas you are a Thomas Cromwell man. I remember you saying: "I can't understand why everyone was so much in favour of Thomas More." Thomas Cromwell was your hero.

DH-A: I would have fought for his cousin Oliver against arbitrary royal power. But in the wider context I believe that the terrible religious wars of the 17th century in Europe were only ended by the Treaty of Westphalia, which created the concept of self-governing nation states tolerant of other people's religions. While the EU is an attempt to go back to a supranational system in which people feel no part.