> Reply and debate instead.

Sorry - you said 'take it or leave it' - which strongly implies that you weren't interested in debate.

> It is a quasi-religious ideology with disturbing similarities to a cult.... The EU and its supporters are not interested in debate on the future of Europe.

Given the huge amounts of time that are spent in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers discussing exactly these issues, I'm going to assume that you simply don't follow European affairs that closely.

> The so-called Parliament cannot actually change anything about the EU itself (it is not a real Parliament) and is thus stuffed with yes men whose only reason for being there is ideological commitment to the vision itself

Oddly enough, yes for the most part the people who stand for EU parliament are those people who think that the EU is valuable and want to get it to work.

You say the EU Parliament is not a 'real' parliament - I presume you mean because it cannot propose legislation. But that is precisely because the people who framed the EU wanted to limit the extent to which the EU Parliament would remove power from national parliaments and nation states. The Parliament can ask the Executive (the Commission) to draft legislation for it to vote on and you can certainly argue that the Commission should be more subservient to the Parliament's wishes - but again, nation states have proved resistant to that idea. Perhaps you would like more power to reside in the Council of Ministers?

There are many potential ways here that the EU could be reformed, if nation states got their arses into gear and actually did it.

> Indeed, we can safely assume that the new federal superstate the EU wants to build would not be a democracy.

No, one cannot safely state that.

> Given the EU's consistent lack of interest in actual, real democratic mechanisms, it is likely that if their plans succeed Europe's future looks pretty grim: something like the USSR of the 1980s. It is the avoidance of this fate that led me to vote out.

This is pretty much all in your head. Yes, if all the member states got together and said 'You know what, lets steer ourselves towards a dystopian future' it could happen. There's nothing in the EU institutions that says that this is an inevitable or even likely outcome.

> In common with many cults the EU deliberately tries to make leaving it as difficult as possible, through a variety of techniques such as insisting that the remaining cult members (who were of course previously supposedly loving friends and allies) shun the traitor and have nothing to do with them. Any sustained connection with members requires complete membership and suggesting it doesn't is an evil attempt to undermine the unity of the group.

Again, you're just making stuff up. So far various EU folks have pointed out, reasonably enough that if you want to have the benefits of full access to the single market, the other aspects, such as free movement of labour have to follow.

> The EU routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "Europe" when they mean "the EU".

Or it's a verbal short hand. Let's try translating shall we?:

The United States of America routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "America" when they mean "The United States of America".

> They also like to suggest that any rejection of the EU is dirty backwards looking "nationalism"

Partly, no-doubt because a large proportion of the people who reject the EU do so due to backwards-looking nationalism.

I don't think your argument is particularly rational. The EU is flawed, the EU can be reformed by its members