As a polemic it's fine, but all the positives you have to offer point to it being a protectionist league.

Take trade - you say it accounts for 60% of our trade.  Is that going to cease if we were not inside the union?  If yes, it just proves it's protectionist.  If no, why worry?  If we were freer, in trade terms, they would only be impoverishing themselves by not trading with us.

Workers rights - workers rights would be better served by truly free trade raising the returns to labour and putting them in a sustainable position not to accept exploitation.  Anti-exploitation measures enforced by law are just protectionist.  (I have to declare an interest here but these "workers rights" threaten my job and my home - if I have to accept I cannot do more than 48 hours a week I'll lose my warden's job and with it the roof over my head....some "rights" that!).

As to the idea of a "Greater France" - France is the most protectionist of the lot.  If it were left up to them Europe would be a third world country compared with Freeport UK.

Peace, well I might grant you that, but no, it was not the EU that has kept the peace IMHO but NATO.  And even then, peace within Europe itself only rather than keeping its member peaceful - the EU was utterly unable to prevent Bliar going to war when it suited him and his transatlantic buddies, and Spain and France very nearly fought a proxy war against us in the south Atlantic!

Ultimately it is governments that wage war, not people, in any case.  In a free country of sovereign individuals we would neither be target nor aggressor.  And America, since it got interested at all in the outside world during WWI, has never been "free trade".  It has often been worse than France on the protectionist scale.  And its sort of protectionism, centred around the military industrial complex, demands war to feed the beast.  And all the economic bodies it created after Bretton Woods and continues to be the most influential in are protectionist at their heart.

Now, I do see a possible little glimmer of hope - that of the entry of the newer members who desperately want freedom, who know only too well the cost of the quasi socialist experiment that is the end of protectionism.   If we were, as you say, to fight tooth and nail with and for them against the western behemoths it might be productive.  But CAP reform was our cry in our 1979 manifesto, thirty years later and the CAP is still impoverishing European consumers and shutting out non-EU poor supplier countries.  But I still say, that is so highly unlikely until and unless we have a proper liberal nation here at home.  And achieving a liberal nation here at home is nigh on impossible while we are part of a protectionist league.  Catch-22.

...is also really a "misquote" to the extent that it is so very frequently used in ways that Smith himself was not discussing when he coined the phrase.  And all you need to do to ensure the security of even the poorest and least able to compete is to ensure their equitable share of the wealth we all create and can easily be determined by "market forces" (eg land values, penalizing negative externalities and so on).

But that aside, my main concern is that the EU may now be holding us back from becoming the truly liberal nation we need to be in the 21st century.  As you acknowledge, change has been slow, and whilst I can see that some of that lies at the feet of semi-detatched UK governments of the past, even with the new accession countries I worry that protectionism is so entrenched that it's going to be far more difficult to root out than we could on our own.

The corollary of course is that if the UK (though it rarely seems to have a mind to do so) plus the accession countries managed to persuade the behemoths of the benefits of a truly liberal, free trade federation, it could be huge.  I just doubt our ability to do so in time.