The European Constitution

During the European Referendum campaign in 1975, as a student in Manchester, I attended two public meeting at the Free Trade Hall. At the first, Edward Heath explained that Britain’s future was in Europe and those who opposed our membership were looking backwards to glory days of empire.

A week later Peter Shore and Tony Benn argued that the EEC was a capitalist conspiracy and that if we remained members of the Common Market we would all end up eating French cheese and sleeping under duvets.

Their main argument was that when we joined the EEC we gave up sovereignty, our ability to make our own laws.

But I don’t think that they, then, could have dreamed of a European Union in which more than 80% of our laws originate in Brussels and in which, according to the Local Government Association, more than half the policies of our local councils are implementing European Directives.

Over the past thirty years, a series of treaties – The Single European Act, Maastricht, Nice, Amsterdam and now the Constitution have - like a ratchet - progressively transferred powers from our democratically elected MPs and councillors to un-elected Commissioners in Brussels, extending their writ into social policy, competition and monetary policy, policing, immigration and foreign policy.

The Common Market that we joined has been transformed beyond recognition. And we are entitled to ask those who support this change where it will end.

In Britain, our leaders reassure us that each successive change represents the high-water mark of European integration.

Gordon Brown, for example, says that “The institutional debate inside Europe is now settled for the foreseeable future”.

Just as John Major, at our Party Conference in 1992, assured us that although “the European Community has centralised too much … at Maastricht we began to reverse that trend.”

Most of my business is in Europe. I have friends and colleagues in Spain and France and Belgium. They have no doubt where European Integration will end.

And over the past three years I have often visited the European Parliament in Brussels. If you talk to almost anyone there, they have no doubt where this will end.

When we joined the EEC, we took as a rhetorical flourish the words of the Treaty of Rome that its members were "determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”.

We were wrong.

The Professional Europeans in Brussels have a vision of United States of Europe and they are not going to let a little thing like democracy get in their way.

There is a reason no country but Ireland will ask its citizens to approve the Constitution. The people of Europe do not want it.

At a summit at the Royal Palace in Laeken in 2001, the Heads of Government declared that “the European institutions must be brought closer to its citizens”. It is a tragic irony that the Constitution that resulted from that summit is to be forced on those citizens, in France and the Netherlands against their express wish, and in Britain without the referendum that we were promised.

The vision of the Professional Europeans is a country called Europe and they will not let a little thing like democracy get in their way. If that is not our vision we must stand up and be counted: for Britain and for democracy.