LONDON — The basic tenet of The Daily Mail is that Britain is not what it was (true enough, it isn’t) and that it would go a long way toward recovering its gritty greatness without wind farms, safety obsessions, green lunacy, overregulation and — above all — the European Union with its meddling bureaucrats.

The formula works. The Daily Mail is the best bad newspaper in the world. It hits every jingoistic British button with eerie precision. Its mix of sex, celebrities, scandal and Brussels-bashing has something of the yucky addictiveness of the Kardashians. The paper boasts a weekday circulation of almost 1.6 million, rising to close to 2.5 million on Saturdays. It also has a wildly successful Web site, Mail Online — but that’s another story.

My concern here is not with The Mail’s journalistic brilliance — no paper is more maddeningly readable — but with what its obsessions say about where Britain is headed with its acute Brussels Syndrome. The Mail wants Britain out of the 28-nation European Union. So does the only daily that outsells it, The Sun. For both papers, Europe is a sort of Soviet Union-lite with plans to regulate everything from female quotas in boardrooms to your doctor’s hours. This is a nation where the agenda of the mass circulation tabloids weighs heavy.

True, the E.U. is a tough sell these days. It is dominated by Germany, a nation uneasy about dominance. It includes France, a nation that has turned malaise into a fetish. Its southern littoral is an economic horror show. Its more than 500 million citizens feel underconsulted and overpatronized.

It is a divided club, with 17 members in the euro zone and 11 members outside. Inside the euro zone, the agony of the euro has demanded a federalizing push — the currency’s salvation but also the direction many non-euro-zone countries (chiefly Britain) do not want to go. As for the union’s great achievements, like, say, peace on a borderless continent, they are oh so 20th century.

Yet none of this quite explains the revulsion served up by The Mail. The other day there was this headline: “I was born a British citizen, and want to die as one. But unless our gutless leaders stand up to Brussels, I won’t be able to.”The article was about a possible plan — the verb “may” is a favorite when it comes to sinister E.U. aims that seldom materialize — to stamp the Union flag on British birth certificates. It was signed Stephen Glover. Glover! I worked with him in the 20th century on Oxford’s student magazine, Isis. He seemed a reasonable, affable chap. Well, I thought, if Glover now lives in fear of being gouged of his inner Briton by Brussels apparatchiks, perhaps the danger is real.

Visions of that blue-and-gold E.U. flag smothering this sceptered isle and its vestigial grit loomed before dissipating: it’s all complete nonsense, of course. Britain, a member for 40 years now, needs the E.U. and vice versa. About half of British exports go to the union. Millions of jobs are tied to it. Foreign investors choose Britain because of its access to the single European market. Parts of Britain’s growing auto industry would leave if Britain exited. The United States would be very grumpy. Banks that have made the City of London Europe’s financial hub would find a Britain outside the E.U. “much less attractive” and migrate over time, as the co-chief executives of Goldman Sachs International put it in The Times of London.

And what of all the Britons who take for granted their right to retire in the Dordogne, or the more than 2.3 million people from the E.U. making the British economy tick from city to farm? “Leaving would be a major disaster,” Helen Alexander, the chancellor of Southampton University, told me. “Anyone who comes here knows we need to be part of something powerful in the world, not some tiny little country in the corner.”Not so, insists Nigel Farage, the leader of the thriving U.K. Independence Party, who tells me The Mail underestimates the ghastly truth (“75 percent of our life is governed from the E.U.”), compares a supranational Europe to Yugoslavia, mocks Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party (“They used to talk enterprise and success, now they talk gay marriage and wind farms”), and declares Britain in Europe “a square peg in a round hole.”“Nobody wants it,” he declares.

We will see. Cameron has called for an in-or-out referendum on the E.U., likely in 2017, in part as a tactic to head off the UKIP. Meanwhile, as The Mail rails on, Union Jacks multiply over Britain, with its royal baby, Olympic triumphs and the rest. They fly over a nation that has never looked so European. Malaise-weary French people find work. So do Poles and Italians. Britain is Europe in miniature with more flexible work hours.

What The Mail hates is not Brussels, but this Britain. Nations have shot themselves in the foot before out of some vague anger. It could well happen here. Britain will exit Europe sans return ticket — in which case I plan to exit Britain on the same terms.