I HAVE long known the EU to be a malevolent institution, but I didn’t suspect before some stuff I read this week that they are absolutely stark staring bonkers and suicidal.

In effect, Britain versus the EU is a rerun of Henry VIII against the Pope, with Henry now being played by Nigel – better off out – Farrage and the Pope by Angela Merkel.

Like the 16th Century papacy, the EU is a self-interested bureaucracy run by unelected elites who issue demands for payment as exorbitant as anything that ever was in the sale of indulgences and Peter’s Pence.

In their malevolence, the EU was greatly aided by the lying scoundrel Ted Heath who allowed the EEC (as it was then) to destroy our fishing industry in return for our membership of the club. Our farmers similarly suffer because of the Common Agricultural Policy which was designed obscenely to favour the inefficient French producers.

Really, the EU is a love affair between the Germans and the French who historically like nothing better than to gang up on the British; though inviting us in from time to time to referee their lovers’ tiffs.

But then I recalled some words a while back of Mr Antonio Tajani, former Commissioner for Industry, who remarked that our energy prices are creating an industrial massacre in Europe.

I have investigated the extent of this industrial massacre and in the last fortnight I have looked at the state of the European aluminium industry, the steel industry and the petroleum refining industry. I am rendered horrified, scandalised and utterly incredulous by what I have I learned.

Here is the news and these are the facts:

The aluminium industry in Europe has lost 34 per cent of its capacity in the past seven years and 40,000 jobs have been lost. That's not because demand has reduced; demand is increasing, and being filled with imports which now amount to more than 50 per cent.

It is a similar story in steel where 100,000 jobs have been lost and plant closures have taken place. The same in petroleum refining. It is now cheaper to bring in refined petroleum products from Africa or Russia than it is to refine them here in Europe. And again we have refineries closing - 10,000 direct jobs gone; 40,000 indirect jobs lost.

That is the extent of the disaster we are creating. There is a similar catastrophe afflicting the glass industry, the chemicals industry and the cement industry.

So we already have major energy intensive industries that are desperately hanging on by their fingernails, and at the same time, the European Parliament is debating the market stability reserve, which is a policy whose objective is to increase prices further and make Europe a less competitive place in which to do business.

This is the central absolutely critical point, the very emblem of EU lunacy.

The petroleum industry is the subject of a British Government report, which indicates that the CO2 emissions associated with imported refined petroleum products are 35 per cent higher than petroleum products refined in the EU: and evidence from the steel industry suggests that a tonne of important steel creates double the CO2 emissions of a tonne of steel made in Europe. So we have created a policy which is exporting jobs, exporting investment, exporting manufacturing, and increasing CO2 emissions at the same time.

It is time to call in the men in white coats, cart off those unelected, psychopathic secular cardinals in the EU Commission to the nut house where they belong and reclaim our national independence – at once.