The EU is hopelessly bureaucratic
Forget all the tabloid nonsense about Brussels bureaucrats banning British sausages. Can you even name the ruling bodies of the EU? (For the record, they are the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the European Court of Auditors.) Here is a diagram of the EU government structure:
Only two of those bodies are elected by the people. The rest are appointed. The European Council and the European Commission make most of the rules in the EU - and yet they are not elected bodies. The EU has three - three! - different "presidents" (the president of the parliament, the commission, and the council).
These bodies are making rules that really do affect our freedoms. For instance, it was the EC that created the "Right to Be Forgotten," the Orwellian law that bans search engines from linking to truthful, accurate, unbiased information if an individual can make a case that it harms them.
And while that bureaucracy is complicated, it is not lazy. Steve Hilton, UK Prime Minister David Cameron's former chief strategist, did an audit of what civil servants inside No. 10 Downing Street were actually working on, according to The Spectator: "Only a third of what the government was doing was related to its agenda. Just over half was processing orders from Brussels," new laws coming from a government that British people do not control.