Pathetically low is what I predict the turnout to be in this year's European elections.

Any vote for any candidate on June 4 will simply perpetuate the myth that the European parliament has any validity or credibility, as well as helping to keep the bloated monster of the EU alive.

The electorates' favourites, tipped by me to gain thumping majorities in 2009, will be Messrs Lethargy and Apathy. This surely is bound to be the outcome.

For thirty-six years now the UK has been shackled to the EU wagon, and what has changed? Year on year we are suffocated with more directives, more bureaucracy, over-regulation, intrusiveness and government by remote control.

No one in their right mind would want to indicate their support for the implied options of 'more of the same, ad nauseam', 'no way out', or 'more rope to hang yourselves with'. So I foresee people deserting the ballot boxes in their thousands.

Can you blame them? Democracy may be a word that EU mandarins may know how to spell, but its meaning remains a closely- kept secret among them. You only have to look at their refusal to recognise the result of the Irish 'no' vote on the EU-constitution- tarted-up-as-an-amending-treaty to understand that.

If you don't ask the right question, you are bound to get a duff answer, which is why the only voting options which European electors should be offered, and the only ones in which they should be encouraged to willingly participate, are referendums on whether or not they want to be part of, or bound by, the EU.

As this is a pie-in-the-sky hope, the only alternative left is to attempt to dismantle the beast from within. If UKIP is able to state unequivocally that, if elected, it will keep its snout out of the Brussels trough and help to derail the gravy train as soon as possible from the tracks, then it may be worthy of consideration. Having said that, there is the small matter of the well-documented expenses- fiddling allegations linked to UKIP to be considered.

The tidal wave of sleaze which has crashed over domestic politics in the form of the MPs' expenses scandal, has been pounding at the shores of Europe for years. While the UK media has been content to work itself into a frenzy over profligacy at Westminster, it has virtually chosen to ignore the excess and wastefulness at the heart of Europe, the sheer scale of which makes the sums involved in Britain look like loose change.

The wine lakes and butter mountains of the 1970s have passed into folklore but they did exist, and they still exist, and have been joined by warehouses full of fruit, vegetables, and other foodstuffs. Masses of produce which would have been available on the open market, is taken out, at EU behest, and kept in storage to artificially inflate the price to the consumer of what remains. Thanks for this goes to the creators and implementors of the Common Agricultural Policy.

CAP's stablemate, the Common Fisheries Policy, by virtue of its quota system – ostensibly set up to help preserve fish stocks – causes the destruction of perfectly edible fish, from which vendor and consumer alike would have been able to profit, by dumping them back into the sea, dead.

This, however, is very small beer indeed compared to the billions we pour into the EU's coffers every year for our so-called membership, bearing in mind the little, if anything, we get back in return. Billions more attach to propping up EU quangos like the Regional Development Agencies, as well as to business compliance with regulations daily spewing out of Brussels.

And I haven't even got started on the pointless shuffling, involving untold millions, of all 785 MEPs for one week of every month from Brussels to Strasbourg and back again, which is still going on in spite of the limp protestations of several MEPs in this newspaper, and which shows no sign of being curtailed.

Don't forget the EU financial mismanagement scandal of 1999, when EU-appointed auditor Paul van Buitenen blew the whistle on the billions of euros which had been misappropriated by members of the ruling EU elite, including the then French commissioner, Edith Cresson. The entire EU commission, we are to understand, led by Jacques Santer, was moved to resign as a result.

The Europhile apologist's argument goes something like this: the EU makes more than 70 per cent of our laws, so we need representatives in Europe to look after our interests. The clear and mistaken implication is that this practice is acceptable.

I question the legality, practicality and morality of the huge, unwieldy, artificial, supra-national EU 'constituencies', like 'South West England and Gibraltar'. How anyone claiming to be an MEP for this region can be held accountable or physically approached in this freakish 'EU parish' geographic mishmash of an area alone, remains a mystery.

MEPs represent pure electoral window-dressing, as the real political clout belongs in the hands of the unelected EU commissioners.

If, in spite of reading all this, you are still motivated to vote on Thursday, ask yourself why you would want to politically underwrite the glorified talking- shop belonging to an organisation whose own auditors have refused to sign off its accounts for the last thirteen years because of the politely-named 'inaccuracies' they contain.