To achieve this monumental task, he offers three reasons, one of which is:

On a practical level, the main product of the EU is regulation. There is good regulation and bad regulation; but there is no escape. No one is going to buy British products that do not meet inter¬national standards. Those standards are set mostly by the EU or the US. If the UK wants to be at the table when the standards are set it has to belong to the EU; otherwise it will have to follow regulations that someone else has made.

That is as far as we need go, allowing us thus to observe that the great benefit of being "above the line" is never having to worry about being wrong. It is an unlimited license to produce any amount of ill-informed drivel, in the certain knowledge that it will always be welcome on the pages of the legacy media.

Any informed student of trade matters will, of course, be aware of the progressive internationalisation of trade regulation (often called globalisation), and any overview of US politics will quickly reveal as much unease in the United States about this process, and the loss of power entailed.

Equally, as far as the EU is concerned, we have charted for some time the degree to which trade regulation is initiated by international bodies, so much so that the EU has become a wholesaler and distributor of regulation rather than its initiator.

But that is no check of the Robert Cooper drivel factory. Here is a man imbued with the most profound ignorance, yet he feels qualified to pronounce on issues about which he clearly knows nothing.

Another person so imbued is Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, a legend in his own lunch hour, pontificating in the Telegraph about parliaments needing an "emergency brake" on EU legislation.

Although roundly taken to task by Autonomous Mind, this will have no impact whatsoever. Rees-Mogg is a fully paid-up member of the drivel factory, his birthright entitling him to produce unutterable tosh and to be applauded by his peers for so doing.

A junior member of the drivel machine, Mark Wallace is given license by the Guardian to ask, "Where are all the leftwing Eurosceptics?", complaining that the British Left has abandoned its "democratic tradition" of opposing the EU.

"With a renegotiation of where powers lie, and an in/out referendum likely to follow in 2017", he drivels, "we ought to see a return of that vanished beast: the leftwing Eurosceptic".

The thing he misses, of course, is that in the polarised politics of the Westminster bubble, the "left" is currently "pro-Europe" simply because the "right" is supposedly eurosceptic. But since all but a tiny fraction of the Tory eurosceptics actually support continued membership of the EU, the difference between left and right is academic. There is no difference between them.

However, the one thing that the drivel factory does, par excellence, is confuse the issues. We noted this a while back, when the Europhile tactics started emerging. They rely, it would appear, on the three-legged stool of "renegotiation, reform and scare" - anything to keep peoples' minds off leaving the EU.

At the time, the right was pushing renegotiation and the left was going for reform, while all sides were free with the FUD, to scare us away from the prospect of withdrawal. Now the drivel merges into one amorphous mess, so successfully confusing the issues that the purity of the argument has been lost.

In due course, we might even see academic papers written on this remarkable weapon, the drivel factory that won the war for the europhiles. If during the shooting war, America became the arsenal of democracy, the legacy media have become the reservoir of drivel, intent on winning the war of words that will keep us in the EU.

And so far, with the drivel factory on overtime, it looks to be winning.

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