We now have an official list of the topics on which Prime Minister David Cameron intends to negotiate with the EU and its members (let us not forget that treaty changes will be required and those will need unanimous approval).

Open Europe gave its own analysis to Cameron's letter and in it listed the demands:

A “formal, legally-binding and irreversible” end to Britain’s obligation to work towards an ‘ever closer union’ as set out in the Treaty,

Legally binding safeguards to protect the integrity of the single market from Eurozone integration,

A more ambitious push on economic competitiveness consisting of further deepening the single market, cutting red tape and concluding FTAs with other global economies,

An enhanced role for national parliaments including a collective veto right over new legislation,

Four year restriction on new EU migrants’ access to UK benefits and a more general crackdown on abuse of free movement.

No surprises there and, as we suspected, there is no mention of either agriculture or fisheries, despite a near-universal agreement that the CFP has been an economic and ecological disaster.

One suggestion as an alternative to EU membership is the so-called Norway model, which would leave Britain in the EFTA (European Free Trade Area) and the EEA (European Economic Area) but return to her a good many other powers. There are, as it happens, a few problems with achieving this status in that Britain would have to rejoin EFTA, having left it when she joined the then EEC. Then she would have to join the EEA as a member of EFTA for which the agreement of every single member of that body would be required. These problems are not insuperable and there is good evidence that the present members of EFTA would quite like Britain to rejoin them.

The Prime Minister has already announced that he did not think the Norway option was the right one for Britain, basing his opinion on that old chestnut, "legislation by fax" though these days it would be by e-mail. Norway, this particular argument runs, has all the disadvantages of being part of the Single Market without the advantage of being there to negotiate the rules.

This argument, that will be used a great deal, is misleading to put it mildly. In fact the non-EU members of the EEA transpose a very small proportion of the EU legislation into their own, most of it having nothing to do with the Single Market. As to having abide by the rules of the country one trades with, there is nothing unusual about that. As only a very small proportion of British businesses actually trades with the Single Market countries (around 8 or 9 per cent) those regulations will not affect the others as they do now.

Most importantly, Norway controls her own agriculture and fisheries.

Nor is it precisely true that Norway has no say in various matters to do with regulations. The truth is, as we know from the state of play in fisheries, that a good many of the regulations come from bodies that are above or outside the EU. At these tables Norway sits in her own right while Britain tends to be represented by the EU.

All negotiations to do with fishing in the North Atlantic, as this blog has mentioned times too numerous to refer back to, are conducted by Russia, Iceland, Norway, Denmark on behalf of Greenland and the European Union. Not Britain or Ireland or Denmark on her own behalf. How bad is the Norwegian model precisely?

Discussing this and related matters in the Daily Telegraph Professor Iain Begg raises an important issue: not much is said about what Britain will look like or what her relationship with the rest of the EU, should the people of the country decide to vote to leave. This is, again, not precisely true. A good many people are discussing alternatives, even as we speak (or write) though HMG is keeping quiet on the subject. We know from certain casually leaked information that the Bank of England is certainly looking at alternatives and one would like to think that our over-lauded and over-estimated civil service is thinking along those lines though one cannot be sure. Big businesses are beginning to discuss the possibilities (and there are several) but it is in the interest of the IN campaign to emphasise that an OUT vote would be a leap into the unknown.

What Professor Begg and his ilk do not point out is that staying in the EU is also a leap into the unknown as we have no idea what it will look like in a year's time, let alone ten years or longer. After all, the EEC in which people voted to stay has changed beyond recognition in the years since the only referendum we had on the subject.

Here is the official response by FAL to David Cameron's speech and oddly enough it agrees with the previous posting with additional comments that are especially relevant to Scotland.

 Mr Cameron has said:

“And to those who say a new settlement can't be negotiated, I would say listen to the views of other parties in other European countries arguing for powers to flow back to European states. And look too at what we have achieved already....... Ending Britain's obligation to bail out eurozone members. Launching a process to return some existing justice and home affairs powers. And reforming fisheries policy. So we are starting to shape the reforms we need now. Some will not require treaty change.”

For those of our readers who want to read the Prime Minister's speech in full, here is the link. You might wish to skip numerous paragraphs. One has to admit sorrowfully that, despite getting the best education this country can provide, Mr Cameron's knowledge of European and even British history is shaky.

Let us pass on to other matters. The biggest one is the tentative, for it is no more than that, promise of a referendum in 2017, assuming the Conservatives win the 2015 election and conditional, or maybe not, on some renegotiations and repatriation of powers.

This is a little difficult for, as Mary-Ellen Synon points out trenchantly in the Spectator, as things stand there is no method whereby powers can be repatriated. That includes fisheries. We cannot negotiate them back. We can, however, announce that we are activating Article 50 of the Treaties, and negotiate a new deal on the basis of that. This, the Prime Minister does not seem to want to do because, as he says himself, his preference is to stay inside the EU.

First of all, happy new year to all our readers. We think this may turn into quite an interesting year from our point of view.

There is quite a lot of excitement in vacuum or vacuous excitement about what the Prime Minister might or might not say in his long-deferred speech about Britain and what is usually referred to in the media as Europe but is, in fact, the European Union, a political construct not a geographical or cultural concept.

Before we discuss what has been said recently about what might or might not be in that speech (and at present nobody outside the PM's office knows) or what the consequences will be, it is worth pointing out yet again a basic fact: talk about "our relationship with Europe or with the EU" is, not to put too fine a point on it, stuff and nonsense. We do not have a relationship with something we are a member of. Only if we come out and renegotiate all agreements do we start having a relationship.

Now that's out of the way, let us turn to what has been said recently and find out if any of it is of any relevance to real life and real people.

First off, we have an article in the Guardian, a newspaper that thinks being outside the EU is the equivalent of political perdition though rather a large number of countries seem to manage to survive and even flourish.

Cameron, we are told, promises that the people of Britain will have a real choice though we have to wait till his speech some time this month to find out whether that means an In/Out referendum. Does that mean he intends to come up with some policies with regards to our membership of the European Union and fight an election on those? That would be preferable to a plebiscite (the old-fashioned word for a referendum). Errm, maybe.

Asked whether that could involve the option of withdrawal, he said: "You will have to wait for the speech.

"But it will demonstrate very clearly that it is the Conservative party at the next election that will be offering people a real change in terms of Europe and a real choice about that change."

He conceded that any renegotiation would be tough but said it was not in Britain's national interest to withdraw and no longer be "round the table writing the rules".

In actual fact, we are not round the table and we do not write the rules as the messy situation with the Common Fisheries Policy shows very clearly. The rules are written by the Commission and decided by 27 member states, usually through qualified majority voting and Britain's views and interests are of little importance.

Anyway, we have little indication from those statements what exactly will be in the speech. One cannot help suspecting that the PM does not know either and his speech writers are flummoxed.

Meanwhile, Gideon Rachman proclaims in the Financial Times that, despite all the many problems and dissatisfactions, Britain, given a chance, would vote to stay in the European Union. Mr Rachman and the FT's optimistic predictions about the EU and the eurozone in the past were not such as to inspire great faith in his analysis but, as things stand, he is probably right. The referendum is likely to be called (if at all) after some cosmetic agreements of change just as it was in 1975. There will be a great deal of money spent on the  in campaign beyond the allotted state funds and, above all, the message will be simple: fear. Our side has not lined up its arguments and is too busy squandering meagre resources and that must change. We must lay out clearly how we should get out of this noxious organization which we cannot reform as we have never been able to and what we shall do afterwards.

In the Daily Telegraph we get Daniel Hannan, a self-appointed spokesman for the mythical eurosceptic David Cameron as well as a Conservative though eurosceptic MEP, arguing that if we cannot do a deal with "Europe" we should get out. That's as far as he goes though he appears to think that the original idea of the EEC was a free market area. It was not. The idea was at all times a customs union with "ever closer union of the people".

Mr Hannan is convinced that Mr Cameron will come up with some very tough proposals and because the colleagues in Brussels will not like them he will have to go for an In/Out referendum and, indeed, campaign for out. There are many logical flaws in that chain of arguments.

At least this article mentions fisheries.

Let’s start with the easy bits. Britain has already announced its intention to opt out of common policies in the field of justice and home affairs. It is almost as straightforward to pull out of joint defence and foreign policy structures.

Leaving the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), and asserting our jurisdiction out to 200 miles or the median line, is tougher, but not unprecedented: until a decade ago, the CFP didn’t apply to the Mediterranean. As for the Common Agricultural Policy, the shift from guaranteed prices to direct support makes repatriation increasingly feasible.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only is Britain not opting out of any common justice and home affairs policies, it is busy opting in wherever there had been an opt-out negotiated.

In fact, pulling out of the CFP would be the easiest and most popular thing to do. In fact, that was the premiss of a paper produced some years ago by the then Shadow Fisheries Minister, Owen Paterson, which was adopted by Michael Howard, the then Leader of the Conservative Party as electoral policy.

What happened to it? Well, Mr Howard lost the election and resigned. His successor, a certain David Cameron, discarded that policy almost as his first act as Leader. For some reason, Mr Hannan does not mention this.