And so people SHOULD vote NO in a referendum - if anybody thinks all this current expenses fannying around with dogfood and lightbulbs in this country is bad, the EU is a seething, rancid pot of corruption and gravy-training for which you and I are paying through the NOSE = vote NO, NO, NO !!

Hello WYN, lovely to meet you.
I agree actually, the expenses regime in the European Parliament is unacceptable. We do indeed pay to be part of the EU, and some of it (e.g. the Common Agricultural Policy) is not money well spent.

Sadly voting NO to the Lisbon Treaty would not actually affect that.
Lisbon is about the shape of the institutions and the decision-making processes on subjects on which we and 26 other countries have agreed to share our decision-making and abide by common rules.
I'm not totally sure it's necessary - in my view the current decision-making processes are functioning fine if not that quickly. But I do object to the idea that we should have a referendum in order to say "no". We should have a referendum to discuss what's actually in the proposed Treaty and then take a decision based on that. And much as I love our free press, I hate, hate, hate the way that we've been fed a load of rubbish about the EU for 30 years, ignoring what it's actually about and doing and infantalising our understanding of our own national involvement in the process.

But there's a cost to not being in the EU too, not just in terms of trade barriers that would be put in place by the EU we'd leave behind (oh come on, if it was the French talking about leaving are you sure we wouldn't impose high tariffs?) but also in terms of the rest of the world.
We shouldn't kid ourselves - we're a smallish island with a midranking-sized population that manufactures little and mainly trades with our nearest neighbours, we've nukes yes and that gives us a seat at the top table in the UN, but partly our power in the world derives from our alliances and even the USA sees that being "in" the EU enhances rather than detracts from our role in the world.