EU Referendum

Something for the Conservatives to chew on this time: The Business reports that international business leaders are turning against the single market.

A poll carried out by Opinion Leader Research for Chatham House – not exactly known for its Eurosceptic tendencies – finds that an overwhelming 63 percent of top executives surveyed thought that over-regulation was destroying European competitiveness.

The poll surveyed 451 senior business leaders in multinational companies. Of the executives interviewed, 341 were from EU member states, 60 from the US and 50 from Japan.

Some 49 percent thought that North America was "business-friendly" while only 25 percent named the EU. Less than half (49 percent) believed the EU was helping business to compete globally and that the single market had benefited their own businesses.

In the past, executives from global businesses have been the most enthusiastic and unconditional supporters of the EU, which makes the results of this poll especially striking, especially when 72 percent believe the EU should focus more on making existing regulations work better.

Interestingly, 55 percent of respondents say that "the single market should not means a uniform market". Their favourite cure to the EU's economic problems is to cut taxes, a policy endorsed by 66 percent of those who replied to the survey.

Chatham House also recorded some interviews, with one business leader saying that, relative to the US, it took 12 times longer and cost four times as much to set up in business in Europe; another said that it took twice as long and cost five times as much to get a patent in Europe as in the US."

Unsurprisingly, British executives were the most sceptical of the single market's merit, with 58 percent believing that North America was more business-friendly than Europe; 54 percent said that the EU was not helping European businesses to compete globally, while a mere 14 percent thought that the EU was helping.

Given that support for the single market is an article of faith with the Conservative parliamentary party, with many MPs terrified of speaking out against it in case their business friends take fright, Mr Howard might have cause to think about whether he should be quite so firm in his support for the status quo.

(Warning: This will be a UKIP-free blog.)

Sometimes I worry about the sanity of the BBC staff. Angus Roxburgh, having described the childish antics of the MEPs over the EU Commission, then came to the conclusion that it was all Barroso’s fault and thanked God that there were some heroes around like Romano Prodi, who readily jumped into the breach and agreed to stay on as President. As if it mattered.

Then there is Rob Cameron, reporting from Prague:

“Outlining the debate in the Czech Republic over the EU Constitution is straightforward: there is no debate.
At least, there is little real debate over the nuts and bolts of the constitutional treaty itself. Not yet.”

“The government is relying on the fact that Czechs are not the most courageous of nations.
They can be almost sure that if all European nations approve the constitution, the Czechs will not say 'No' because they won't want to be the spoilers.
It's an efficient and effective strategy, but it's not the most courageous one.”

While the front page of The Sunday Telegraph flags up two stories of vital public interest, one on John Peel’s final interview and the other about Beckham being set to move to Chelsea, buried in the Booker column as his third story is the account of "a fascinating row" that has broken out over the increasingly bitter hostility between the USA and the EU over their rival satellite positioning systems: America's GPS and Galileo, based on the 30 satellites the EU plans to have in space by 2008.

Booker is referring back to a story published in The Business last week which reported that the US was prepared to blast EU satellites out of the sky if they were used by hostile powers – an issue we dealt with in the Booker column last July, when my pamphlet on the political and military implications of the system was published by the Bruges Group - a story which has been greeted by a storm of denials.

However, Allister Heath, who wrote last week's The Business story, has come back strongly this week in a comment and analysis piece headed "US threatens to take space war to a third dimension".

Thirty-five years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, he writes, the world is sleepwalking into a new multi-billion dollar space race – this time with the European Union (EU) and China working together in a bid to wrest control of space from America. Echoing my own belief, Heath continues:

The implications are hard to exaggerate: America's position as the world's only hyperpower is under attack, Nato will be consigned to history and the global economy put under huge strain. Bizarrely, however, few realise what is happening - and the British and European foreign policy establishments are always on hand to deny that anything untoward is going on.

In today’s Sunday Express, Kilroy-Silk devotes his whole column to UKIP, with a heading: "What a relief I’ve split from UKIP bosses". The piece is trailed on the front page with an even more robust statement: "The truth about my row with UKIP fools".

His piece opens with a not an unfamiliar scenario – not unfamiliar, that is, to me:

Immediately after UKIP’s victories in the European elections in June, I suggested a meeting of party leaders so that we could build on our success and develop future strategy. UKIP leader, Roger Knapman, the European parliamentary leader Nigel Farage, the two main financial backers, Paul Sykes and Alan Bown, my wife Jan and I met in the Goring Hotel, London, on Monday June 13.

We agreed that we needed to establish a London HQ, assemble a research team, develop policies, draw up the manifesto for the general election, appoint spokespersons and plan a series of initiatives throughout the summer, leading to the October party conference which, I anticipated, would unveil the manifesto.

Nothing happened. Weeks passed, nothing happened. Several times I told the party leadership that we were losing the political initiative that we had gained in June. We should, I stressed, be exploiting the panic we had occasioned in the Tory Party and the alarm felt by the Prime minister about his project to create a superstate called Europe being wrecked.

Nothing happened. The leadership of the party went AWOL for three long summer months. We wasted precious time. We threw away our advantage. It was unforgivable, criminal. The British people had placed their trust in us and we were letting them down.

As I said in my conference speech, the British people are disenchanted with the old political parties. They are fed up of being lied to, talked down to and not listened to. they want a party that talks straight, tells the truth and will fearlessly stand up for Britain and the British way of life.

This could have been UKIP. It could have seized the opportunity. You could not do it by going missing for a third of a year. The chance will not come again. Take it now and we could change the face of British politics. Do nothing and we shall regret it for the rest of our political lives.

The preferred metaphors of various europhiles have always had to do with speed and transport: trains, bicycles, convoys, whatever. The strange idea there is that once you are on whichever form of transport you have chosen, the destination no longer matters, only the fact that there is movement. (This is, of course, true about London Underground but one cannot base political metaphors on that institution.)

The train part always amused me as it reminded me of the train of the revolution that was taking the unfortunate people of the Soviet Union and, later, other countries to the utopia of communism. The metaphor was rather ingeniously and picturesquely mixed with the trains that sped with Red Army troops across the fronts of the Civil War, the propaganda trains (shame about their progenitor, Trotsky, who was never mentioned) and the trains that brought the ideas of communism to the far-flung villages (as well as the death squads but that was passed over). There was even a song about it. But, at least, there was a firmly stated destination.

On the other hand, the bicycle metaphor, as well as being more suited to the careful, rather bourgeois methodology of the European integrationists, is also more accurate. If it is not moving, it falls. You can put your foot down and stop the movement for a time but sooner or later a decision has to be taken whether you go forward again or drop the machine.

With the Constitution and the various referendums we are coming to the point when the bicycle may have to be stopped long enough for decisions to be taken. Clearly, the EU is not going to collapse and its managerial, undemocratic, unaccountable legislative system will carry on, as well as all the other integrationist measures we have enumerated. Still, at the very least the bicycle will start wobbling and stumbling.

All sorts of problems are being faced over the referendums. Take the case of France. As the BBC Paris correspondent says on the World Service website:

“French politicians have long seen the European Union as an extension of French power, a deeply political project steered mainly from Paris, with Germany as the junior partner.”

There are many people, not least those in the Commission, who are ever-ready to dismiss Booker’s stories as "myths" and, for a long time, his column featured prominently on the section of the European Commission’s UK website devoted to Euro-myths.

As an example of the commission’s attention to detail, however, it is worth looking at one of their attempts to debunk such a "myth", this one being a claim by Booker in his column of 20 December 1998 that, under EC directive 92/58, it would be a criminal offence to display any sign reading 'Fire Exit', unless the design also carries a 'Europictogram' of a running man.

The response by the commission, under the heading, "fact", was:

The differences between the safety and health signs currently used in the workplace can lead to uncertainty and confusion. This may become more widespread as more people choose to work in other European countries. The use of standardised signs in the workplace will in general help reduce the hazards which may arise through linguistic and cultural differences. Firms were given 18 months to introduce the changes.

As all our ressources (sic) are presently working on on-going certification programmes, the Certification Team is currently unable to respond to all the information requests received on the general e-mail address linked to certification issues. It is hoped that this situation will soon be rectified and this general e-mail address for certification related information requests will be operational again on the web as soon as possible. Please check our web site regulary (sic) for further information.

What was that about there being lies, dam' lies and statistics? And that was before opinion polls were invented and Eurobarometer was even thought of.

According to the BBC website every member country has a large majority that rather agrees with the Constitution, even Denmark, Ireland, Poland and the UK. Of course, when one starts reading the analysis one realizes that in several countries, notably France, the sailing will be far from plain. Nothing is to be taken for granted on either side.

Still it is a pretty map.

Should the European Union lift the arms embargo on China, introduced after the bloody crack-down on the demonstrators in Tiananment Square in 1989? President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder say yes. (Nothing to do with the two countries’ arms producers that are eyeing the growing Chinese market longingly.)

Schröder insisted during his visit to China last December and on various occasions since then, that China has changed greatly in the last ten or so years. Others, notably the Taiwanese, the Tibetans, the Falun group, various dissidents and religious groups in China, not to mention outspoken journalists and writers, beg to disagree. China still has the largest network of labour camps for “re-education” purposes in the world.

The United States says no, arguing that lifting the embargo would simply prevent any positive developments in China’s human rights record (so dear to the heart of the EU leaders in theory) and destabilize the region. Well, of course, if the Americans are against it, the EU must be for it. That is the only guiding principle of the common foreign and security policy.

Until recently Britain and Italy were against it for many of the same reasons, but have changed their minds in a somewhat inexplicable fashion, possibly competing for that place at the heart of Europe.

The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries remain firmly opposed for human rights reasons.

Now the ruling German coalition has voted against it in the German parliament on a motion brought in by the Greens and the Social Democrats, going against their leader, the Chancellor.

Ludger Volmer, who speaks on foreign affairs for the Greens, was cogent on the subject. China’s behaviour towards Taiwan and her human rights record made it impossible to contemplate lifting the embargo in the near future.

Others, notably the SPD, were a little more muddled. The embargo could not be lifted until certain conditions were fulfilled. And what were those conditions? Well, the EU must produce toughter guidelines on arms exports and China should sign the United Nations political and human rights pact. Well, if that’s all, I should think it could all be sorted out in a few days. After all, signing the pact does not mean you would adhere to it; and agreeing to the EU guidelines does not mean that these will be remembered five minutes after the ink is dry on all those signatures.

Still, for the moment at least, the embargo stays. What exactly will happen when the Galileo system is put into place, remains to be seen.

I had the somewhat dubious pleasure yesterday of going to Rotherham – the constituency of Denis MacShane – to be interviewed by BBC television with Anna Chester, the Yorkshire and Humberside representative of Britain in Europe.

Before I have even managed to open my mouth, the egregious Anna Chester was denouncing the "lies" and the "myths" of her opponents, and pledging to bring to the attention the consequences of voting against the constitution – the clear inference being that a "no" vote meant leaving the European Union.

What stunned me rather was the sheer aggression of this approach – the interviewer called it "passion" - and the total negativity. As usual, it was a pledge to tell people about the constitution, rather than actually telling people about it.

In response, I chose my words carefully, offering the line chosen by Mark Steyn in his piece for The Daily Telegraph on 22 June, when he suggested that the salient fact about the constitution was that "it’s the legal framework for a state".

It is a question of whether you want a self-governing country or want to be ruled by a state called Europe, said I, or words to that effect, only to have our Anna dissolve into paroxysms of indignation, denouncing my suggestion that the EU was becoming a "superstate".

Evidently so conditioned was this lady that she had not even listened to what I had said. I carefully avoided the term "superstate". As my colleague and I have observed frequently, while the EU is undoubtedly acquiring the trappings of a state, there is nothing at all "super" about it.

But then, it seems, a common characteristic of the Europhile fraternity seems to be its prickliness. For instance, the egregious Toby, on his Europhile site "straight banana" has taken exception to my lapse of good manners in my Blog, describing Steven Everts, senior research Fellow at the London-based Centre for European Reform, as a "dismal little cretin" for describing Eurosceptics as "anti-Europeans".

But my point is really quite a simple one. Either Everts doesn't know the difference between being "anti-EU" and "anti-European", or he is being deliberately provocative. In either event, the epithet stands.

I really am getting a little tired of the puerile little jibes from the Europhile fraternity, and my patience is wearing thin. If these people cannot enter into a debate without resorting to their games, then they really should not be surprised if they are not treated with the civility to which they believe they are entitled.

Most of all, however, what seems to upset our Toby is what he takes to be my assertion that "pro-EU people" hold their views because they are too stupid to understand their own follies. Has it not occurred to me, he asks, that there might be some people who have thought about the issues in an intelligent way and come to a considered opinion which happens, rightly or wrongly, to be different to his?

What price then a sample of the output from the Britain in Europe site:

Britain in Europe need you. The forces ranged against us are strong, but unrepresentative of the British people. Are you willing to have the future of this country decided by foreign press barons and their hired pens? We are not afraid of the anti-Europeans or their silly arguments.

Like most things in the EU, it has crept up on us. For years, the EU was only an "economic community". Justice and home affairs first feature in EU treaties with Maastricht in 1991, and have been moving forward ever since. Now we have ideas such as the common European arrest warrant and a common asylum policy. We are also moving towards a pan-European prosecuting magistracy and the granting of executive powers to Europol, which is supposed to be no more than a body for police co-operation, rather than a European police force.

No doubt there will be great rejoicings in the European Parliament and much (well, some) metaphorical throwing of hats in the air in the media about the great victory for, oh I don’t know, liberty or equality or fraternity or something of that kind. Buttiglione has announced that he will stand down as the Italian Commissioner, in order to help the new Commission become strong and actually take up its position.

The presence or absence of the new Commisison has not made a jot of difference to the European Union or its legislative and regulatory process. If you do not believe me, have a look at the Official Journal and count the number of Regulations published every day.

Nor has it exactly enhanced the democratic prestige of the European Parliament. They are still the junior partners in the European project, representing nobody, as there is no such thing as a European people or demos. But the EP has served a purpose. The MEPs revealed the true, somewhat intolerant nature of that project. To be part of it one must support one particular strand of political, social and moral thinking. And, since we do not have a choice of whether we want to be part of that project (having become citizens whether we liked it or not), we, presumably, shall all have to accept that point of view and make it our own.

Buttiglione is not too far out when he describes himself an innocent victim. Nor is the Catholic Church (or any other Christian group), a central part of that European identity that the EU is supposed to be an expression of, wrong in raising the alarm. In fact, we should all start getting worried, whether we agree with Buttiglione or the Catholic Church’s teachings or not.

In the meantime, there is discussion of who will be the replacement. Possibly Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini or, possibly, Mario Monti, who would not be averse to a third term, will be called back. That, the BBC avers, would be a popular choice. Popular among whom?

At least Blair had the decency - if it can be called that – to skip the grand, ceremonial banquet in Rome yesterday, after signing the constitution, this time having the excuse of his recent operation, allowing him to claim tiredness.

But early departures are something of a feature of Blair’s "engagement with Europe", most notably at Porto Carras in July 2003, when Giscard presented his famous draft constitution to heads of state and government.

Also of note then, Berlusconi had taken on socialist leader, MEP Martin Schulz, likening him to a Nazi concentration camp guard. How sweet Schulz must now regard his "victory" of bouncing Buttiglione and embarrassing Berlusconi. As they say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

That, at least, gave the press corps something else to do, other than witness the ungainly bunch step forward and add their signatures to the document of infamy, and if they were at least fairly positive about the event, we now know why.

All the journalists attending, and there were 1,890 accredited, each was provided with a gift pack comprising pen, notepad and a set of mugs – just the things that no respectable hacks would have thought to bring with them. Cameramen, strangely enough, were given their own disposable cameras. One can imagine what they did with them.

Other statistics give some idea of the scale of the event. there were 580 PC stations, provided, 20 plasma screens set up for the assembled hacks to watch the proceedings, served by 42 video cameras; 30 press agency mobile stations were kitted out. To serve the electronic media, 250 km of cable and 60 km of fibre optic cable was laid, and to deal with the more immediate needs of the press, there were 90 hostesses on call – a mere one per 200 hacks.

And just in case they were bored, 1500 copies of the preliminary speeches to the signing of the constitution were provided, with 1800 CD ROMs on the constitution – one wonders which version.

Back home, Michael Howard had already dismissed the constitution, in a speech to Goldman Sachs stating that "The EU was designed to liberate our markets. Instead it has burdened them with extra costs and regulations, undermining their ability to compete… yet far from addressing these problems, the European Constitution will compound them."

The constitution "will be a giant ball and chain round the ankle of British business," he added.
Shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, also weighed in with his personal condemnation, saying: "What we are seeing today is the opposite of democracy in action. The pomp and ceremony of seeing a treaty which the British people have indicated in opinion poll after opinion poll they do not want to see shows, in my view, a contempt for people."

Good stuff, for once.

Howard and Ancram has an unexpected ally in Italian Institutional Reform Minister, Roberto Calderoli. He has told his boss, Berlusconi, that he was "against the new EU Constitution" which he saw as "negative and involving a transfer of popular sovereignty." "Therefore", he added, "the Italians must vote. I am going to propose the approval of an ad hoc constitutional bill allowing the people to vote. A simple ratification bill is not enough".

If Berlusconi does need a replacement for Buttiglione, he has a likely candidate here.
Straw, of course, is gung-ho for the whole thing, telling us that it might be in March 2006, but also stating that the British referendum "won't necessarily be the last one of all the member states." Asked if Britain might not hold a referendum if France had already rejected it, he said "All sorts of things are possible."

Blair, we are told, is hoping to use Britain's EU presidency to launch the referendum, hoping he can keep the issue on the back burner until after the election, although he has to publish a bill within weeks of next month's Queen's Speech, in order to get the referendum underway, and to start the ratification process.

The idea is to get it over quickly, so as to clear the way for the election. That plan may, however, be scuppered by the Hunting Bill, if it is delayed by the Lords.

But, if things do go to plan, that puts the referendum campaign proper starting in July 2005, giving Blair nine months to get his message across. One can almost empathise with Bertie Ahern, who wants his referendum in Ireland to be "be the last for a long time."

There again, if some countries vote against the constitution in their referendums, they could make them the best of three… five, er… seven… Either way, we are in for the long haul. Just as well those journalists got their free notepads and pens.

As the Israelis wisely allowed Chairman Yasser Arafat to leave his compound for medical treatment in France, Javier Solana has sprung into the breach on behalf o the European Union.

As we have written several times before, the EU has consistently supported Chairman Arafat, despite his political, legal, humanitarian and purely personal financial record, mainly because he was seen as part of the Palestinian problem by both Israel and the United States (as well as a large number of Palestinians, but let that pass).

It has been reported that Solana, the foreign affairs supremo of the EU, briefed the Palestinian delegate in Brussels, Sevki Al-Armali, of his talks with the Israeli government, in which he insisted that Arafat’s safe return home after the completion of his treatment should be guaranteed. All well and good, but given Arafat’s age and health problems, it may not be the Israeli government or the mighty EU that will be making the decision.

Solana has also expressed concern about potential problems in Gaza caused by Arafat’s failing health and the forthcoming Israeli withdrawal. No detailed ideas have been advanced publicly. All previous solutions, that is, demands that Israel do this, that or the other, somehow seem unsatisfactory at the moment.

President Putin has been openly campaigning for the pro-Kremlin candidate in the Ukrainian elections, which have been marred by a great deal of violence and intimidation as well as a suspected murderous attack on the opposition presidential candidate.

There is a strong suspicion that in a year or so there will be a referendum in Russia, similar to the Belarus one, which will change the constitution to give Putin another term (or as many as he might wish).

Tension in Eastern Europe is also increasing by the feeling that Russia is trying to insinuate itself into the economies of those countries through the energy industry. We have already reported that Russia supplies a very large proportion of the oil and gas that the new member states use.

In a recent enquiry in Poland into details of a Russian attempt to take over the country’s second largest refinery, Rafineria Gdanska, by Lukoil, evidence has been presented of all kinds of skullduggery from agents of the KGB’s successors. Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, a former Polish spy chief and an important figure in the ruling left, said in his testimony:

"I agree that we are facing a restoration of the Russian Empire through economic means and with the principle of 'yesterday tanks, today oil'."

“The most shocking revelation the inquiry has produced so far was that Poland's richest man, industrialist Jan Kulczyk, held secret talks in Vienna about the future of the Polish energy sector with a former KGB agent resident in Poland. According to declassified intelligence reports, made public by a special parliamentary committee leading the inquiry, Kulczyk had offered to use his
political influence to help Russian firms make another try for the Gdansk refinery.

Kulczyk denies the accusations.”

Blair has today elevated Neil Kinnock and Chris Patten to the House of Lords. It is assumed that he has moved quickly to strengthen his case for the constitution in the House, where the government might face opposition from the Tories in spite of their calls for the referendum to be held.

My thanks to Anne Palmer for this important piece of information, obtained from Europe Direct:

…we would like to inform you that as the signature by the Heads of State and Government is foreseen for 29 October 2004, the definitive printed version of the text of the future Treaty will not be available before the beginning of 2005.

According to Matthew Tempest, political correspondent of The Guardian, in his online report on the signing of the constitution:

The new "rulebook" for the EU replaces over 80,000 pages of legal documentation accumulated through a variety of treaties bonding the original European Economic Community of 1957, and was prompted by the accession this year of 10 new member states, mostly from the former Soviet block.

This analysis has been compiled by the National Platform EU Research andInformation Centre, 24 Crawford Avenue, Dublin 9, Ireland.

It draws from many sources and has been checked for legal accuracy by authorities on European law; its political judgements are those of its compilers. The National Platform is affiliated to The European Alliance of EU-critical Movements (TEAM), which links together some 60 organisations in 20 different European countries that are concerned on democratic and internationalist grounds at EU developments, excluding racist or fascist bodies ).

The National Platform's secretary is Anthony Coughlan, who is an economist and Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin, and who may be contacted at 00-353-1-8305792

THE TREATY ESTABLISHING A CONSTITUTION FOR EUROPE

An analysis of the Constitution that makes the EU into a State

"The Constitution is the capstone of a European Federal State."

Guy Verhofstadt, Belgian Prime Minister, Financial Times, 21-6-2004

"For the first time, Europe has a shared Constitution. This pact is the point of no return. Europe is becoming an irreversible project, irrevocable after the ratification of this treaty. It is a new era for Europe, a new geography, a new history."

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Le Metro, 7-10-2004

We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes."

Jean-Luc Dehaene, Former Belgian Prime Minister and Vice-President of the EU Convention, Irish Times, 2 June 2004


AN EU STATE CONSTITUTION THAT IS SUPERIOR TO NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS

The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, to call it by its proper official name, is not just another EU treaty. This Treaty (Art.IV-437) repeals all the existing EC/EU treaties from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Nice and then founds or establishes quite a new EU, based on its own Constitution. Legally, constitutionally and politically this new European Union would be quite different from the existing EU.

The new EU, founded on its own State Constitution, in fact becomes a new European State in the world community of States. A young State and a new one, a weak State perhaps, but a State nonetheless, with virtually all the essential features of a State, in which the existing Member States are reduced to the constitutional status of regions or provinces. Simultaneously the EU Constitution becomes the fundamental source of legal authority within Europe, supplanting the Constitutions of the Member States as the ultimate source of legal power.

The EU Constitution becomes part of our Constitution and will not be amendable except with the consent of other countries. This is therefore the most decisive step ever in the near-60-year-old project of European integration, aimed at turning the EEC/EC/EU into a fully-fledged State, a superpower in the world.

To call it a "constitutional treaty" is to downplay its significance. "Constitutional treaty" implies that this is comparable to previous EU treaties like Nice, Amsterdam, Maastricht, and the Single European Act, whereas the most important thing about it is that it is a Constitution as well as a treaty. In international law a Treaty is a contract or agreement between independent States, the High Contracting Parties, as equal sovereign partners.

A Constitution is the fundamental law of a State, setting out its institutions of government, how it makes its laws, determines its policies and actions and relates to other States. This treaty will only be a treaty until the Constitution comes into effect. From then on it is the Constitution we will be bound by and will have to obey.

Article 1.1 of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe states: "This Constitution establishes the European Union." As the European Union already exists as an intergovernmental cooperation between its Member States established by the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, what this Treaty-cum-Constitution proposes is an EU that would constitutionally, legally and politically be a fundamentally different thing from the EU we are at present members of.

Article I-7 gives this new European Union, established now on the basis of its own Constitution, legal personality and a distinct corporate existence for the first time. Hitherto the EU has had no legal existence apart from its Members. At present the Member States, not the EU, are superior. This is shown by the fact that the Member States if they wished could agree at any time to dissolve both the EU and EC, and interact with one another like the rest of the world community of States, and as they did themselves before the 1957 Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community (EEC).

The Constitution changes this. Legally and constitutionally it makes the new EU separate from any of its individual Member States, just as Germany is a separate state from Bavaria or Brandenburg, the USA from Virginia or California, and Canada from Ontario. This is the most essential constitutional step for those who seek to turn the EU into a State, an international actor in its own right for the first time.

Article I-6 then provides that "The Constitution and law adopted by the Institution of the Union in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the law of the Member States." Thus the proposed Constitution of this new EU overrides and is superior to the Member States' national Constitutions, potentially in all areas of public policy; for the EU Constitution does not seek to reserve any governmental area permanently from EU control. The central issue concerning the EU Constitution is this:

Which Constitution takes precedence, the European one or the national? That after all is the central question of politics: Where do power and legitimate authority lie? The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe is clear. The new EU State and its Constitution will be paramount.

If the Constitution is ratified, the EU Member States would constitutionally and legally become provinces within a European Federal State, with their national democracy, sovereignty and political independence abandoned as they agree formally to subordinate themselves to the superior entity, as in any State Federation.

The Constitution's continental champions are quite honest about this, like the Belgian and French Premiers quoted above. In fact an earlier draft of Article 1 stated explicitly that the Union would exercise its competences "on a federal basis." The word "federal" was dropped because of concern that it would hinder ratification in some countries.

The Article now provides that the Union will exercise its competences "in the Community way." That is a Federal Statist way, even if the words "Federal" and "State" are not used. In a Federal State there are two levels of law-making, with the Federal level superior to the provincial or regional level.

Having repealed all the existing EC/EU treaties, the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe then reapplies the existing body of EU law, some 100,000 pages of it, as if it were made under the constitutional primacy of the Constitution established by the new Treaty.

Simultaneously it transfers some 40 further areas of government policy or national decision from the Member States to the new Union, centralising them in the Brussels Institutions.

NO LONGER "POOLING SOVEREIGNTY", BUT ACCEPTING AND GIVING ALLEGIANCE TO A NEW SOVEREIGN

It is an historical moment of some importance - this attempt to turn much of the continent of Europe into a State and world power, in which 25 previously sovereign Nation States are reduced constitutionally to provincial status in a European Federation. Their hitherto sovereign peoples and national Parliaments must thereafter obey the laws made by the 25 politicians on the Council of Ministers in Brussels, backed by the EU's supranational bureaucracy.

This is no longer a question of States "pooling sovereignty" in some limited areas of government, the better to attain certain agreed purposes. "Pooling sovereignty" was always a misleading term anyway, aimed at disguising from the public the reality of what was happening. The legal concept of sovereignty has nothing to do with international power or economic weight. It refers to the exclusive right of a State to make its own laws, and consequently of its people consequently to govern themselves.

It is therefore no more possible to "pool" sovereignty than it is to be half-pregnant! But in so far as people believed that EU membership involved some such pooling, the Constitution's provisions now show the unreality of that. Under the Constitution the sovereign powers of the European Union would be vested in European Institutions, the EU Council, Court, Commission and Parliament, which are given legal supremacy over the laws and sovereignty of the Member States.

The EU and its Institutions would become our new sovereign. We would all, for the first time, become legally bound as direct citizens of this new legal entity. One can only be a citizen of a State. Under the Constitution we would legally become citizens of the new European Union, not just as an honorary title, an adjunct to national citizenship, as under the Treaty of Maastricht, but with rights and obligations direct to the European institutions rather than through our national institutions.

Article 1-10 provides: "Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights and be subject to the duties provided for in the Constitution."The once-in-a-lifetime decision of adopting the EU Constitution would directly concede power and sovereignty to the EU over the legal and constitutional framework that guards our civil liberties and democratic rights. It would do this for our children and future generations. It would change the international status of our country from being an independent democratic State to being a subordinate state within a greater European power.

Those pushing the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe are effectively asking us to be abandon our right to determine the laws we agree to obey and to decide our own government, which is our most fundamental democratic right.

IDENTICALLY WORDED PROVISIONS HAVE DIFFERENT LEGAL IMPLICATIONS IN AN EU CONSTITUTION AS COMPARED TO A TREATY

Parts 1 and 2 of the four-part Constitution are its core constitutional parts. Part 3 transposes most of the existing EU policies into the Constitution, while adding some new ones. This doubtless is what has led some politicians to refer to it as a "tidying-up exercise". That is to play down the significance of what it proposes.

A fundamentally important point here is that the EU Court of Justice (ECJ) which interprets EU treaties and will interpret the Constitution if it is ratified, does so in relation to their "objects and purposes", as shown by their preambles or other evidence of the intentions of their drafters.

That is the continental legal tradition, in contrast to the emphasis in English-speaking countries on the meaning of the wording of treaty provisions in the present tense.

The ECJ has laid down in the 1992 EEA Agreement Case that identically worded provisions in two separate treaties can be interpreted to have very different effects. Clearly changing the legal basis of the European Union from a series of treaties to a self-contained Constitution would fundamentally alter the Court's view of the objects and purposes of the legal texts it is applying.

In practice, there would be a presumption that the Member States are only permitted to exercise powers in the residual areas left to them under the Constitution, and even in those areas they would be regarded as constitutionally obliged to fit in with any over-arching EU policies or foreign policy imperatives in accordance with their general duty to "facilitate the achievement of the Union's tasks and refrain from any measure which could jeopardise the attainment of the Union's objectives"(Art.I-5).

Shifting the EU from a treaty basis to a constitutional basis would radically affect the Court's interpretation and application of treaty provisions as well as of the scope of EU directives and regulations. Henceforth all EU laws would be interpreted by the Court as having the force of constitutional law. It would be quite proper of the Court of Justice to see all areas of national government as either actually or potentially subordinate to the EU Constitution.

If the proposed Constitution is ratified, the only significant power of Statehood the EU would not possess would be the power to impose taxes. The EU State-builders aspire to that in time and the Constitution opens a legal path towards it. One can only be a citizen of a State, so the Constitution makes us legally real European Union citizens for the first time, for up to now the EU did not have legal personality or a corporate existence on its own account.

Only the European Community, covering the supranational areas of the EC treaties, had that under the Treaty of Maastricht. Now the new EU State will be founded on its own Constitution just like other States.

It will possess its own population and citizenship, a territory, an external frontier, a currency(the euro), an armed force(the EU Rapid Reaction Force), an embryonic police-force in Europol and judiciary in Eurojust, a legislature in the Council of Ministers and EU Parliament, an Executive (the EU Commission), a Supreme Court (the ECJ), a political President (the proposed President of the European Council), a Public Prosecutor's Office, a human rights code (the EU Charter), a foreign and security policy, a Foreign Minister and diplomatic corps, a body of federal law that covers ever-expanding areas of life and that is accepted as superior to national domestic law in any case of conflict, and power to conclude international treaties with other States in the ever-growing areas of its exclusive competence.

A State needs its State symbols. Unsurprisingly therefore Article I-8 of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe provides that the EU State is symbolically capped with its own flag, anthem, motto and annual public holiday - Europe Day - which are given a legal treaty-cum-constitutional basis for the first time.

The new EU State will have control, or potential control, according to the terms of its Constitution, over all areas of public policy, even though in a new and young State it can take time for that to become clear. A European Union founded on its own Constitution may seem a weak State by comparison with other States and to have some peculiar institutional features.

But it would be no weaker than the early USA after it first adopted its Constitution and before it became strong and centralised enough to prevent some of the Member States that founded it breaking away in the 1860s American civil war. The EU State may strengthen, break-up or remain weak in the years to come - only time will tell - but a State it undoubtedly will be if the Treaty is ratified and the Constitution comes into force.

IS THERE ANYTHING GOOD IN THE EU CONSTITUTION?

There are some positive proposals in the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. It provides that part of the meetings of the Council of Ministers when they are formally adopting new EU laws would be held in public, although most of their discussions would still be in private. It provides that one million or more EU citizens coming from "a significant number of Member States" may petition the Commission to propose a new EU law to the Council of Ministers, although neither the Commission nor the Council need accede to such a request.

A Protocol on Subsidiarity lays down that the Commission must give National Parliaments prior notice of any law it intends to propose, and if one-third of these contend that the proposal violates the principle of subsidiarity, the Commission must review its proposal, after which it may decide to maintain, amend or withdraw it. The Constitution also provides for a Member State that wishes to leave the EU, although the procedure it lays down for this could significantly disadvantage a State that sought to negotiate a fair withdrawal agreement.

The EU Member States can introduce all these changes anyway, in so far as they are desirable, without establishing the EU itself as a State on the basis of its own Constitution.

BACKGROUND TO THE CONSTITUTION

The most revealing account in English of the history of European Iintegration to date is C. Booker and R. North's "The Great Deception, The Secret History of the European Union" (Continuum, London and New York, ISBN0-8264-71056-6) A revised paperback edition of this book, bringing the story down to the signing of the Constitution, will be published in spring 2005.

Why do these authors speak of "deception"? Because the process of building a Europe-wide State has taken place in gradual steps, by governments using stealthy salami-tactics, a series of five treaties between 1986 and now, each of which has been represented to the public in the Member countries as necessary and desirable for economic growth and jobs.

But the real political State-building aim has been subscribed to only by the key political, economic and bureaucratic elites that are pushing the project. It has not been agreed to by the citizens of the different countries of Europe, although the Constitution confronts them with that choice clearly for the first time.

There have been five gradual steps to the EU State Constitution:

1957 Rome Treaty: free trade; a protected agriculture; supranationalinstitutions in the EU Commission, Council of Ministers and EU Court ofJustice;1987 Single European Act Treaty: the internal market; wide use of majorityCouncil voting to make EC laws;

1992 Maastricht Treaty: the euro as a single currency for the eurozone, but excluding Britain and Denmark, with Sweden opting out de facto in its 2003referendum; beginnings of a common foreign and security policy;

1998 Amsterdam Treaty: "the progressive framing of a common defence policy";2003 Nice Treaty: "enhanced cooperation"; sub-groups of EU States may usethe EU institutions for closer integration among themselves even if othersdisagree, opening the way to an unequal EU with an inner core dominated bythe Big States.

The historical origins of the EU project are in the 1920s and 1930s, withJean Monnet and others who conceived and pushed it for decades. Threefactors gave it impetus after World War 2:

* State Power Motivation:

Well-known Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung sums that up as follows:"One basic formula for understanding the Community is this: 'Take fivebroken empires, add the sixth one later, and make one big neo-colonialempire out of it all" (The European Community, a Superpower in the Making,1973.)

It is not the whole story, but it is perhaps the most essential partof the story. The "foundation myth" of the EU is that it has its origins asa peace project to prevent wars between France and Germany. In fact war wasimpossible between individual members of either of the two blocs during theCold War. Washington and Moscow would just not have permitted it. The atomic bomb makes inter-State wars in Europe impractical anyway. Most wars are civil wars.

The end of the Cold War in 1989 brought war back to Europe after 45 years of armed peace - in Yugoslavia and Chechnya. The real historical model for the EU is the unification of Germany in the 19th century, which began with a customs union and common market, then became a confederation of formally equal states, and then a unified Federal State with one Constitution, currency, army and government to represent it internationally vis-a-vis other States.

* Economic Motivation:

The aspiration of European-based transnational firms to be as free as possible of national State control and interference and to obtain maximum freedom of operations for their profit-maximizing activities. Constitutions do not normally enshrine an economic ideology, which is the stuff of debate between political right and left, but set general rules for working out such differences.

By contrast the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe erects extreme neo-liberalism, laissez-faire, a competitive market economy on the basis of cross-national free movement of goods, services, capital and labour, and a monetarist economic policy into constitutional principles.

These are especially congenial to the EU-based transnational firms organised in the EU Employers Federation, UNICE, and the European Round-Table of Industrialists, who have been the principal advocates of successive EU treaties prior to their negotiation, and major backers of the international European movement.

* Personal Power Motivation:

The process of EU integration transfers power from elected national parliaments and governments to a small number of politicians and bureaucrats, who obtain a huge accretion of personal power thereby.

At national level Ministers are part of the executive arm of government, responsible to their elected national parliaments and citizens. But transfer a particular policy area to Brussels and the relevant national Ministers become supranational EU legislators, members of what is literally an oligarchy, a legislative committee, of 25 persons on the EU Council of Ministers who make laws for 450 million people.

They are irremoveable as a body. They become ever more distanced from their national electorates. Their willingly accepted personal task vis-à-vis their fellow Ministers, with whom they interact on first-name terms, becomes to deliver their peoples in support of further EU integration National parliamentarians who aspire to become Ministers, whether they are in government or opposition, go along with this. Someone has described this process as "a slow coup against political democracy". It means that at national level those running the State itself become party to depriving their fellow citizens of the power to make their own laws and decide their own government.

Simultaneously at civil service level senior members of national bureaucracies are substantially freed from public scrutiny as powers are transferred to the bureaucracy in Brussels with whom they regularly interact. There they prepare EU laws for enactment by the Council of Ministers outside the ken of national parliaments or even the European Parliament, which can propose amendments to EU laws but cannot have those amendments adopted without the agreement of Council and Commission. Democracy, public accountability, wilt or disappear. This process, which would accelerate under the EU Constitution, is clearly building inevitably to a major crisis of democracy across our continent.

THE EU'S FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC PROBLEM

It is possible to turn the EU into a State, but it is not possible for that State to have a democratic basis. The reason is that democracy means rule by the demos, the people, through the representatives they elect and on whom they confer legitimacy and authority.

A European people does not exist except in the statistical sense, and one cannot be artificially created from above in the way the EU is attempting. The 450 million inhabitants of the EU are divided into many peoples, real national communities speaking their own languages, who desire to make their own laws, decide their own government and self-determine themselves as they have done for generations through representatives they elect and who are responsible to them.

The EU cannot be democratised by giving the European Parliament power to make laws instead of the 25-person Council of Ministers, as some suggest. The democracy that is needed to underpin a stable State is not just majorityrule, but majority rule on the basis of a community, a demos, normally a national community, where there is sufficient mutual identification and solidarity among its members as to induce minorities willingly to obey the majority, so giving majority rule its legitimacy and authority.

The existence of such a real, self-aware community is crucial for underpinningthe legitimacy and stability of a State with its own tax and public service system, from which some citizens are net gainers and others are net losers - if that State is to be stable and endure. It is the absence of such a community at European level, and the impossibility of artificially creating it, that is the root cause of the EU's crisis of authority and acceptability.

The EU's "democratic deficit" problem is inherently insoluble without repatriating major powers back from the supranational to the national level. The Constitution does the opposite of this. If it is ratified it can only worsen the crisis of democracy at both EU and Member State level. Just as people often only appreciate the value of health when they become ill, they appreciate the value of their democracy only when they have lost it, and they must begin the struggle to win it back again.

So it is and will be with the EU.

WHERE THE CONSTITUTION CAME FROM: THE LAEKEN DECLARATION AND THE CONVENTION THAT FAILED TO DO ITS JOB

The 105-person body, the Convention, that drew up the Draft Constitutionwas set up by the Laeken Declaration of EU Presidents and Prime Ministersin December 2001. This Declaration acknowledged the lack of democracy and transparency in the EU, said that the Union needed to be brought closer to its peoples, referred to the possibility of "restoring tasks to the Member States" and the possibility "in the long run" of adopting "a constitutional text."

Instead the Convention, which was dominated by Federalist EU-State-builders, rushed headlong into drafting a Constitution that for the first time makes the EU separate from and superior to its constituent Member States, transfers more powers from Member States to the EU, reduces the power of national parliaments and citizens further, and contains not a single proposal to repatriate powers from Brussels to Member State parliaments.

Over 1000 amendments were proposed, but the Convention chairman, former French President V.Giscard d'Estaing, ruled out any votes. Giscard decided when there was a "consensus" and that was that. The Draft Constitution was amended by the June 2004 EU summit of Presidents and Prime Ministers in relation to the population-based voting figures, the reduction in the number of Commissioners to two-thirds of the Member States after five years etc.

There has been no popular demand that the EU should be turned into a European State on the basis of its own Constitution. It is Europe's powerful political and bureaucratic elites, especially in the Big Countries, that are pressing that. Small Country elites are happy to go along, in particular if they face big problems at home, as the East Europeans do, for which they can henceforth seek to put the blame on Brussels.

What fundamentally inspires most of them is the old European dream of Big Powerdom, the intoxication of empire-building, of taking part in however small a way in running a Superpower, while simultaneously freeing themselves from democratic control and political accountability to national parliaments and electorates domestically. The pressure for EU integration that culminates in this Constitution comes wholly from the top down, not the bottom up.

STRUCTURE OF THE EU CONSTITUTION

The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe has 448 Articles dividedinto four parts. With its Protocols and Declarations it is some 800 pageslong. Following its signing in Rome in October 2004 it will go around forratification by all 25 EU Member States by November 2006. Some 10 countries will hold referendums on it. It cannot legally come into force if any one of them says No.

One of the Declarations states that if all 25 States do not ratify it they will meet to discuss what to do, but there is no legal mechanism for imposing the Constitution on a country that does not want it, or forcing such a country to leave the EU. In theory if 23 States said Yes and two said No, the 23 could set up a new Union based on the proposed Constitution, while the existing 25 would retain the existing EU with its resources, structures, euro-currency and institutions. But two EUs of this kind side by side is quite unrealistic.

The edited text of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe may be consulted here. The Reader-Friendly Edition of the EU Constitution by Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde is the most useful text to enable citizens to understand theConstitution, because of its invaluable Index and Glossary. This is available on the internet here.

Part 1, with 60 Articles, is the core constitutional part. It lays down the Union's general principles, sets out its objectives and values, its Institutions and the respective powers and competences of the EU on the one hand and its Member States on the other. It is clear and readable, even if much longer than the US Constitution. People should take care to read it. Its provisions are short, if deadly for national Constitutions.

Thus Article I-1: "This Constitution establishes the European Union"; Article I-6: "The Constitution shall have primacy over the laws of the Member States."; Article I-7: "The Union shall have legal personality"; Article I-12: "The Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has not exercised, or has decided to cease exercising, its competence."

Part 2 (54 Articles) is the Charter of Fundamental Rights. For the first time ever this gives the EU Court of Justice power to decide our human rights in all areas covered by EU law. The ECJ in Luxembourg should not be confused with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which is not connected to the EU and has over 40 European States as members.

Part 2 is important in that the Constitution could create new rights or take away existing ones. It would supersede our national Constitution, which is clear about rights, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, in areas affected by EU law, whereas the meaning of some of the rights in the Charter is anything but clear - the right to "human dignity" for example, or the right to "good administration".

The inclusion of a human rights code with full legal effect is further evidence that this is a truly Federal Constitution for a new EU. Unless adequately restrained, the doctrine of the legal supremacy of the EU Court of Justice would allow the new EU rights law to displace national provisions in highly sensitive areas of social policy, unrestrained by democratic accountability or control.

Part 3 (322 Articles) is the largest part. It sets out the detailed policies and functioning of the EU - free movement of goods, services, capital and labour; agricultural and fisheries policy; economic and monetary policy; foreign and security policy; crime and justice policy; social policy; EU financing etc. Much of this is already EU law, apart from the new powers the Constitution gives the EU, but the Court of Justice will interpret these provisions as having the force of a constitutional imperative if the Constitution is ratified. That is why the provisions of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe are more significant than those of a conventional EU treaty.

Part 4 (12 Articles) gives general and final provisions dealing with ratification and amendment of the Constitution, the admission of new Members and provision for a State to leave the EU. It provides for succession by the new European Union to the rights, responsibilities and assets of the existing Union. It carries over the 100,000 pages of the acquis communautaire from the old EU and entrenches the case-law of the ECJ as the source of interpretation for this and for the Constitution.

Protocols: The 36 Protocols or agreements on particular topics attached to the Treaty now become part of the EU Constitution and are as legally binding as its substantive text. They include Ireland's Abortion Protocol (No.31), which generated controversy at the time of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. They also include the Eurotom Protocol (No.36). The Euratom Treaty, which supports nuclear power, was due to end in 2007 after being in existence 50 years. It is now given an indefinite lease of new life by being made part of the EU Constitution. In addition there are 48 Declarations, which are not legally binding but are statements of political intention by the States making them.

ELEVEN KEY FEATURES OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NEW EU

1. PROVIDING THE NECESSARY CONSTITUTIONAL BASIS FOR AN EU STATE

A Treaty is an agreement between legally equal sovereign States, the High Contracting Parties. A Constitution is the fundamental law of a State setting out the relations between its subordinate parts. Up to now the European Union has been a descriptive term referring to various forms of cooperation between the EU Member States, some supranational – the so-called Community "pillar" - some intergovernmental, the foreign policy and security "pillar" or the justice and home affairs "pillar".

Up to now the European Union has been legally indistinguishable from its Member States. The Constitution changes this. Article I-1 states "this Constitution establishes the European Union, on which the Member States confer competences to attain objectives they have in common."

These objectives are set out in Article I-3 and are very wide. They include promoting the EU's values - also very wide - a single market based on free competition, establishing an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, sustainable development, economic growth, full employment, price stability, social justice, upholding the EU's values and interests vis-a-vis the wider world etc.

Article I-7 provides: "The Union shall have legal personality." Article I-6 lays down: "The Constitution and law adopted by the Institutions of the Unions in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the law of the Member States" That includes their constitutional law of course. This has never been stated in an EU Treaty before.

The doctrine of EU legal supremacy was developed by the EU Court of Justice in the 1960s in relation to the mainly economic areas of the EU, in which EU law was accepted as superior to national law in any case of conflict. This was the relatively narrow, supranational, area of the European Community, or EC.

Non-economic areas such as foreign and security policy, or civil and criminal law, were "intergovernmental", based on treaties between equal State partners and outside the domain of supranational Community law. The EU Commission, the non-elected body that proposes all EU laws, had no function in these intergovernmental areas.

The Constitution abolishes this distinction between the supranational "Community" area where EU law operated, and the "intergovernmental" areas where it did not apply. It thus brings all government policy either actually or potentially within the scope of the EU. It is one thing for Member States to go along with a principle of EU legal superiority established by the EU Court of Justice and applied to a restricted range of matters like customs duties or tariffs. It is quite another to concede national sovereignty to an EU Constitution whose writ covers everything from economic policy to criminal law to foreign policy and fundamental human rights.

2.EU POWERS AND COMPETENCES ... THE EU COURT DECIDES THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN EU AND NATIONAL POWERS

The Constitution gives the EU exclusive competence - i.e. powers – in certain areas of government(Art.I-13). This means the Member States lose all power to decide such matters. "The Union shall have exclusive competence in the following areas: Customs union; competition rules for the internal market; monetary policy (for eurozone members); common fisheriespolicy; common commercial policy."

Exclusive competence means that it is the EU, not Member States, that will conclude international treaties with other States for these areas. The existing legal obligation on Member States is not to enter into an international agreement which conflicts with an EU obligation.

The Constitution now greatly extends the areas in which the EU is entitled to conclude treaties in its own name: "The Union shall also have exclusive competence for the conclusion of an international agreement when its conclusion is provided for in a legislative act of the Union or is necessary to enable the Union to exercise its internal competence, or insofar as its conclusion may affect common rules or alter their scope.". This would cover for example international crime conventions and extradition and asylum agreements. Together with the provisions of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Constitution would deprive Member States of much of their present treaty-making powers.

Then there are areas of shared competence, where power is divided between the EU Institutions and the Member States. This is a peculiar kind of sharing, for EU power is stated to be constitutionally superior or primary, so that Member State powers are essentially residual and on sufferance.

Article I-12 provides: "The Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has not exercised, or has decided to cease exercising, its competences." Areas of shared power with Member States include the internal market, elements of social policy, economic and social cohesion, environment, transport, energy, the area of freedom, security and justice, aspects of public health etc. In jurisdictional disputes as to the boundary between EU powers and Member State powers, it is the EU, through the Court of Justice, that would decide which is which.

A gesture towards placating concerned democrats and "sovereignists" is Article I-11(2), which provides: "Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Constitution remain with the Member States." This is like the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1791, which states that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

However, the 10th Amendment has not prevented the USA from becoming a fully-fledged and highly centralised Federal State over time, with provincial states like New York, Virginia and Kansas quite subordinate to the Federal Government in Washington. The similar Article in the EU Constitution can offer no such reassurance either.

In addition the Constitution gives the EU the right to coordinate theeconomic and employment policies of its Member States, to conduct a common foreign and security policy covering all areas of foreign policy including "the progressive framing of a common defence policy", and "to take supporting, coordinating or complementary action" at European level vis-a-vis its Member States in relation to industry, health protection, education, vocational training, youth, sport, culture and civil protection.

3. EU LAWS TO BE BASED MAINLY ON POPULATION SIZE, WHICH ADVANTAGES THE BIG STATES

Apart from the establishment of the European Union as a State in its own right, the most important provision of the Constitution in power-political terms is the shift to a primarily population-based voting system for making EU laws by the Council of Ministers. The Constitution abolishes the weighted voting system that was agreed in the Treaty of Nice to provide for EU enlargement. It lays down instead that EU laws will in future be made by a "double majority" of States and population: 55 percent of the Member States, at least 15, as long as they include 65 percent of the EU's population.

Thus 15 States, if they satisfy the 65 percent population criterion, would be able to outvote 10. On the number-of-States criterion a blocking minority must be at least 11 States, so that will be harder to assemble than before. This shift to a mainly population criterion for EU law-making makes it easier for the Big States with their big populations to get their way. It reduces the relative voting weight of middle-rank and smaller Member States. It would make EU laws easier to pass, which means there would be more of them.

The word EU law" replaces "directive" under the Constitution, as is normal in States.

4. MEMBER STATES TO HAVE NO EU COMMISSIONER FOR ONE-THIRD OF THE TIME

One-third of the Member States will lose their Commissioners five years after the Constitution comes into force. Thus each Member State will have no national representative for lengthy periods of time on the body that proposes all EU laws which those States and their citizens must obey.

5. A NEW POLITICAL PRESIDENT, AN EU FOREIGN MINISTER AND DIPLOMATIC CORPS, AND AN EU PUBLIC PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE

The European Council of Presidents and Prime Ministers will elect a permanent Council President for up to five years, who will preside over their quarterly summit meetings. The present revolving six-monthly EU presidency system will disappear. The European Council President will be the EU's top job, the chief political representative of the EU, in effect its Head of State and chief spokesman to the world.

The EU Minister for Foreign Affairs will conduct the Union's common foreign and security policy, chair the Council of Foreign Ministers, manage the EU diplomatic service (The European External Action Service) and serve also as a Vice-President of the Commission. Only States have Foreign Ministers. For the rest of the world the EU Foreign Minister will be the foreign policy representative of the fledgling EU State. As the Foreign Minister will be appointed by majority vote this will make it possible for some Member States to be represented internationally at EU-level by someone who is unacceptable to them.

There will be a European Public Prosecutor's office to prosecute fraud against the EU, whose powers may be extended by unanimity to prosecute any serious crime with a cross-border dimension.

6. AMENDING THE EU CONSTITUTION WITHOUT NEED OF FURTHER TREATIES OR REFERENDUMS

The "Passerelle" or Bridge Clause:

Article IV-444 provides that the European Council of Presidents and Prime Ministers, acting unanimously, may authorise the Council of Ministers to act by qualified majority in areas where unanimity is currently required.

This cannot be done if a national Parliament objects, but the formal approval of national parliaments is not required. This means that policy areas where States still retain a national veto can henceforth be put under EU majority voting without the need for new treaties, formal parliamentary approval or ratification by popular referendums - as would at present be required for any such development - so long as the Heads of State and Heads of governments of the EU’s member states agree.

Convention Chairman Giscard d'Estaing dubbed this escalator article, the passerelle or bridge clause, "a central innovation" of the EU Constitution. It is not hard to see why. The existence of this and other "passerelle" clauses means in effect that the Constitution will not be a wholly accurate guide to its own provisions.The Flexibility Clause:

In addition there is the "flexibility clause"(Art. I-18) which provides that if the Constitution has not given the EU sufficient powers to attain one of its very wide objectives, the Council of Ministers, acting unanimously "shall adopt the appropriate measures".

This enables the Council of Ministers to extend their own powers without need for new treaties, so long as they act unanimously. This has been widely used over the years for internal market matters. The Constitution replaces an existing treaty article, Number 308, which applies only to the internal market, and extends its scope to everything in the EU Constitution, including civil and criminal law, fundamental rights, social policy, culture etc. This is an extraordinary power to have in a supposedly democratic document.

Delegated Legislation by the Commission:

Article I-36 of the Constitution allows the Council of Ministers to delegate law-making powers, such as making regulations, to the non-elected Commission as regards "non-essential elements" of EU laws. The Council decides what is "non-essential" but it could be very wide.

This turns the EU Commission, a body of nominated, not popularly elected persons, which France's President De Gaulle once described as "a conclave of technocrats without a country responsible to nobody", into a subordinate legislature in its own right, which we all as EU citizens must obey.

7. "LOYAL" SUPPORT FOR EU FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY... EU DEFENCE MOVES FROM "MAY" TO "WILL"

The Constitution provides for a unified foreign and military policy for the new EU State. Art.1.40 lays down that "Before undertaking any action on the international sceneŠeach Member State shall consult the others within the European Council or the Council." EU Members are thus constitutionally precluded from conducting a meaningful independent foreign policy.

The Constitution provides that the Union's competence in matters of common foreign and security policy "shall cover all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union's security, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy that might lead to a common defence."(Art.I-16).

It lays down as a constitutional imperative that "Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's actions in that area." The word "loyalty" here again shows which is superior.

Article I-40(3) of the Constitution requires all Member States, including the military neutral ones, to "make civilian and military capabilities available to the Union for the implementation of the common security and defence policy" and to "undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities."

The Constitution points to the end of the formal military neutrality of Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Austria by replacing the Nice Treaty provision that the progressive framing of a common defence policy "might lead to a common defence, should the European Council so decide" with the provision of the Constitution that it "will lead to a common defence, when the European Council, acting unanimously, so decides."

(Art.I-41).

"Enhanced cooperation", permitting sub-groups of States to use the EU institutions for closer integration amongst themselves may now be undertaken in the security and military area, as was not permitted by the Nice Treaty. Here it is to be called "structured cooperation".

This inner group of States is likely to be bound by a mutual defence pact, will work closely with NATO and will be served by the EU Foreign Minister. The Constitution does not require EU actions in the military field to be in accordance with the United Nations Charter, which is the foundation of modern international law. As a superpower-in-the-making the EU reserves theright to ignore the Charter if need be.

8. THE EU CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS GIVES THE ECJ POWER TO DECIDE OUR RIGHTS

It is proper that the EU and its Institutions should respect and abide by human rights. But should they have the power to decide those rights? Part 2 of the Constitution makes the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which was approved as a political document by the Nice summit in 2001, now legally binding in supranational EU law. This gives the Court of Justice power to decide our rights in all areas covered by European law, including Member States when implementing that law. The scope of EU law is now vast and most EU policies can be interpreted as having a human rights dimension.

In disputes as to the boundary between EU law and national law, it is he Court that would decide. This adds a further tier of lawyers and judges t EU level for people seeking redress in human rights cases. Justice delayed is justice denied. Big corporations will find it easier than private citizens to contest claims in the EU Court. This should make the vindication of human rights slower and more difficult in practice.

The Constitution states that the Charter "does not establish any new power or task for the Union." But the EU does not marry anybody, or provide health or education services, or concern itself with matters like reproductive cloning, academic freedom, the rights of children and the elderly, conscientious objection to military service etc.

Why then should it list these and many other things as rights in the Charter when they are wholly outside its powers and functions and up to now have been the exclusive responsibility of Member States with their national Constitutions and Supreme Courts? What is the point of listing them if they are not enforceable?

Neither is there any consensus across Europe on a wide range of human rights matters that could arise in an EU context - for example hard drugs, legal procedures such as trial by jury, displaying religious symbols in schools, marriage, succession law, abortion, euthanasia. How can the ECJ purport to lay down a common cross-EU standard of rights in such sensitive areas?

Article II-112 allows all the rights set out in the Charter to be overridden by providing that they may be limited by law "to meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union." So the fundamental rights are not so fundamental after all. The conflict between a right and a justification for derogating from it is a highly political matter, in deciding which the Court of Justice would be able to extend its powers further.

The preamble to the Charter states that the fundamental rights listed in it are to be interpreted by reference to the "Explanations" prepared by the Convention that originally drafted it. This means that the ostensible legal meaning of the rights in the Charter may be altered significantly by the Court of Justice in interpreting them, relying on a document drawn up by a different body from that which drafted the Constitution. Article II-62 provides that "no one shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed."

Yet the associated article of the Explanations lifts this restriction and states that the death penalty may be imposed "in times of war or during the immediate threat of war", presumably for EU-led operations, for all the Member States have abolished the death penalty in such circumstances.

The Charter does not strengthen workers' rights to organise or act collectively, as some have claimed. Article II-88 states that workers have these rights "in accordance with national laws and practices". The associated Explanation, which is now part of the Constitution, emphasises this and points out that the right of collective action is one of the elements of trade union rights laid down in Article 11 the European Convention of Human Rights, which all Member States are already bound by.

In so far as Article II-112 allows fundamental rights to be limited in the interests of the Union, some future ECJ judgement might possibly threaten workers' rights that have been long fought for and established at national level. The Charter as it stands ostensibly protects an employer's right to lock out his employees quite as much as an employee's right to go on strike, depending on what their national labour law lays down.

In truth, making the EU Charter of Rights legally binding under the EU Constitution has more to do with power than rights. Giving a human rights jurisdiction to the EU Court of Justice has huge federalising potential, as the history of the USA has shown. It could potentially bring the Union's Supreme Court, the ECJ, into virtually every area of our lives.

9. THE EURO TO BE CONSTITUTIONALLY THE EU CURRENCY

Article I-8 states that "The currency of the Union shall be the euro." If the Constitution is adopted, all EU Members will in effect have voted for and be constitutionally committed to abolishing their national currencies and replacing them with the euro, even though 13 of the present 25 EU Members still retain their national currencies.

10. EXTENSIVE EXTRA POWERS FOR THE EU

The Constitution extends EU powers to make laws that override national law in over 40 new policy areas or matters, in addition to the 35 areas agreed in the 2003 Nice Treaty and the 19 areas in the 1998 Amsterdam Treaty.

Under the Constitution national vetoes disappear for most things. The new areas transferred to the EU include judicial cooperation in criminal and civil matters; harmonisation of legislation on criminal proceedings, sanctions and the definition of offences; border controls; asylum and immigration; civil protection; Europol and Eurojust; energy; culture; services of general interest(i.e.public services); structural and cohesion funds etc. Article I-12 lays down that "Member States shall coordinate their economic and employment policies within arrangements as determined by Part 3, which the Union shall have competence to provide."

This opens the way to extensive economic supervision and coordination powers for the Unionover its Members. It goes well beyond what is possible under the existingEU treaties and could potentially cover such things as taxation policy,national public spending, pensions policy and industrial policy.

11. AN IDEOLOGICAL CONSTITUTION

The Constitution of any normal State lays down the rules and institutionalframework for political decision-making. It does not seek to pre-empt theideological content of those decisions. That is left to political debatebetween the parties of Left and Right, abiding by the Constitution'sdecision-making rules. The EU Constitution is different. It enshrines aparticular economic system based on an extreme neo-liberal ideology, which it seeks to clamp as a constitutional imperative on 450 million Europeans.

The Constitution turns the fundamental principles of classical laissez-faire, free competition across national and State boundaries on the basis of free movement of goods, services, capital and labour, into constitutional imperatives, implemented by the rules and Institutions it establishes and enforced by the EU Court of Justice. At the same time, the sanction it gives for supranational regulation transfers the corporatist governmental traditions of some countries, e.g. France, to the pan-European level.

The Constitution enshrines as constitutional principle the monetarist economic policy of the European Central Bank, whose sole brief in setting interest rates and controlling the money supply of the eurozone is to ensure stability of prices, not maximise economic growth, foster employment or advance social cohesion. It encourages the privatisation of public services and permits the imposition of such policies on countries outside the EU through the trade and investment agreements the EU concludes under its Common Commercial Policy.

It lays down as one of the objectives of the EU "a highly competitive social market economy", but there is no definition of the term "social market", which is taken from the German Constitution, or anything to indicate that something other than maximising competition is implied. These ideological objectives and values of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe seek to pre-empt society's fundamental political choices into the indefinite future, as no other modern Constitution seeks to do.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO THE EU CONSTITUTION

IF THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION IS REJECTED BY ONE OR MORE COUNTRIES, THE EU WILL CONTINUE AS IT IS NOW ON THE BASIS OF THE 2003 TREATY OF NICE, WITH THE VOTING ARRANGEMENTS WHICH THAT TREATY LAID DOWN FOR A EUROPEAN UNION OF 27 STATES

It would be appropriate then to revisit the Laeken Declaration, reconvene the Convention on the Future of Europe on a more democratic basis than Giscard's Convention of EU State-builders which gave us the present undemocratic document, and have a genuine debate among Europe's peoples and parliaments on the kind of Europe people really want.

Almost certainly that is not a Europe which is a State or superpower in its own right, run by a narrow elite of top politicians and bureaucrats, within which the ancient countries of Europe are reduced to the constitutional status of subordinate regions.

It is more likely to be a Europe of cooperating independent democratic States, where powers are repatriated back to the EU Member States from Brussels, as the Laeken Declaration originally mooted but which Giscard's Convention totally ignored. It is likely to be a Europe where national parliaments and voters have their democratic rights restored and where democracy, political self-determination and representative government are re-established for the peoples and nations of our continent.

Democrats all over Europe should say in the coming period: EU ConstitutionNo thanks; No to the EU State Constitution; Yes to democracy.

At the Campidoglio - a Michaelangelo-designed complex of buildings on Rome's Capitoline Hill - the motley crew that collectively rejoice in the description of "European leaders" - some of whom would be in jail if it was not for their positions - have signed their dire constitution.

The signing was carried out in the sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, the same spectacular hall in a Renaissance palazzo where in 1957 six nations - Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg - signed the union's founding treaty, the Treaty of Rome.

AP lauded the event as a "diplomatic triumph" which the "leaders" hope "will give the union a sharper international profile and speed up decision-making in a club now embracing 25 nations."
This is the sort of guff that we are going to have to stomach for some time, while various commentators gush about the wondrous joys of this constitution.

We are told, for instance, that the constitution foresees simpler voting rules to end decision gridlock in a club that ballooned to 25 members this year and plans to absorb half a dozen more in the years ahead. It includes new powers for the European Parliament and ends national vetoes in 45 new policy areas - including judicial and police cooperation, education and economic policy - but not in foreign and defence policy, social security, taxation or cultural matters.

Now the battle begins to bring this collective insanity to a halt.

That is the Scotsman headline on today’s event in Rome – the signing of the EU constitution – I refuse to call it the "European" constitution. And the impossible mission? The EU is launching a campaign to be loved.

As EU leaders prepare to sign their dire document, they look around the continent and see popular sentiment tending to indifference and even hostility. And they’re beginning to realise that some salesmanship may be needed to keep the project on course.

That job will fall to Margot Wallström, who will eventually be in the hot seat as communications commissioner

But already, national leaders are making their pitch. Bertie Ahern, Irish president and midwife to the treaty, is telling his people that the constitution is "a good deal for Europe and a good deal for Ireland", exactly the same phrasing used by Blair, so the colleagues must have worked out a common pitch.

With that, the Irish government has been quick off the mark, launching a pamphlet and guidebook in Dublin to explain what the constitution would mean for Ireland. Ahern is telling the media that a well-informed debate was needed ahead of a referendum, something which he cannot mean, otherwise the Irish, like everyone else, would kick the constitution into touch.

Meanwhile, Steven Everts, senior research Fellow at the London-based Centre for European Reform, points to the Europhiles having a hard time of it. It is not so much the constitution, he says, but the very idea that Brussels technocrats are making important decisions without consulting ordinary people that has alienated many Europeans.

"The anti-Europeans’ most persuasive claim is that the EU is an elite project over which ’the people’ have virtually no influence," he adds.

One day dismal little cretins like Everts will realise that what really pisses off most of us is his fatuous labelling of the citizens of the many proud nation states of Europe as "Europeans" and the mindless insistence that anyone against their beloved project is "anti-European".

But then, I suppose, if these people had enough brain cells to understand that, they would not be in favour of the project in the first place.

The Latvian Prime Minister, Indulis Emsis, has gone to Rome to sign the Constitution tomorrow, as has the President of the country, Vaira Vike-Freiberga. In between the champagne receptions these two will have to have some interesting conversations.

Emsis’s government has just resigned as the parliament voted out his budget with 53 votes against and 39 in favour. Apparently, even some ministers voted against it. So, errm … who is Mr Emsis to sign the new Treaty of Rome?

Not content with speaking up for its own interests, the Peoples’ Republic of China is now calling on the whole of the Earth to rise up to resist the US space monopoly (therefore, strictly, the Earth minus the USA).

So speaks the official news organ of the Chinese government, China Daily, which in a release today cites an article in the "Business Week" magazine which claims that Galileo is under threat by the United States. This, of course, is the article last Sunday in The Business, which referred particularly to the use by China of Galileo for military purposes.

However, China Daily confines the US threat to attack the Galileo network if "it is used by alleged adversaries, such as terrorists" and then condemns this intent as "nothing but a US monopoly" which "sharply runs counter to the spirit of peaceful use of outer space and closer international space co-operation."

Says China Daily: "It explicitly demonstrates, once again, the urgency for the rest of the world to have an independent satellite-based positioning and timing infrastructure to ruffle the dominance of the US amid mounting worries about its post-September 11 hegemony in the name of anti-terror".

In words that the EU would hardly use, but has always been the unspoken rationale behind the project, it identifies the intention of Galileo as, "to free the EU from its reliance on the US Global Positioning System (GPS)".

But what is really telling is its description of Galileo, which it says, "promises a more reliable and accurate service unaffected by military needs, and uninterrupted access for all users, both civil and military." So much for a system that is for civilian use only.

And the US desire to protect its position is called "sabre-rattling", which speaks "volumes about the importance for the rest of the world to be present on the international scene in all aspects of cutting-edge technologies."

Space is so vast and any earthly ambition to monopolise it would make no sense, says China Daily, and "The Pentagon should be fully mindful that the world will never accept 'serfdom' in space by relying solely on US GPS."

Quite. But that the China Daily does not address it why anyone should be worried when the US, in an act of generosity, has made its GPS freely available to all users, and is threatening action against Galileo only if its is used for military purposes against US troops or assets. Since, we are told, the Chinee intend only to use Galileo for civilian purposes, what is their problem?

One really does not know whether to laugh or cry at the latest developments in the EU parliament. Given the propensity to hedge one’s bets, the best option is probably both, simultaneously. Actually, hysterical giggling is more in order.

Scanning the considerable news coverage of the events, neither is it possible to single out coverage that best (or at all) captures the moments, although I like some of Rosemary Righter’s comments in The Times, especially the bit where she writes about MEPs talking about a triumph for democratic accountability as being "an insult to their voters". "Is has been more like "a witch-burning", she adds without much originality: Rocco Buttiglione himself called it a "witch-hunt", as did the Conservative Party.

Driven by increasing desperation, in my search for something that did convey some sense of what is happening - or not, I was even driven to read Boris Johnson’s op-ed in the Telegraph. His piece is entitled, "The Euro parliament is no longer a joke for bored hacks" which, if it was true, is more than can be said for the author of the piece.

Our – well, "your", I don’t want him – Boris seems to be suffering from pangs of jealousy, as he toils away in the mother of parliaments, voting his little socks off in all those divisions (there were rather a lot yesterday) while this upstart parliament in Strasbourg was having all the fun and glory.

Generally, there is nothing politicians crave more than for publicity, so one feels for poor little Boris, who must be getting withdrawal symptoms, having not been in the headlines for at least five minutes. But even such a person as he can occasionally come up with something sensible. He writes: "We may be less exotic than the Euro MPs, but at least people tend to know who we are, and how to get rid of us".

I wish, Boris, I wish, but unfortunately, I do not live in Henley and you are really not worth the life sentence that would come with doing it the other way.

So, where do we all stand after this deluge of media coverage? The answer, dear reader, is exactly the same place as we were before it. Today's newspapers are but tomorrow's fish and chip wrappers (EU hygiene directives permitting). Nothing, but nothing has changed.

And the proof of the (low-salt) pudding is in the eating. As new graffiti appears on the walls of the Strasbourg parliament, proclaiming "Kilroy was here – but not for long", tomorrow, 25 European leaders assemble in Rome to sign the constitution.

Entirely endorsing my colleague’s comments about the silliness of the games played in the EU parliament yesterday, the commission's trade spokeswoman, Arancha Gonzalez, in today’s International Herald Tribune, sums it all up in one pithy phrase. "Life goes on," she says.

In particular, the short term actions by the commission will continue as before. Just because Neelie Kroes is not in place to make a decision on the Microsoft case, that does not mean it will not be taken. Mario Monti will continue in his old job, and he will do the business.

Likewise, while Mandelson was due to fly to Washington next week to deal with the next instalment of the Boeing/Airbus dispute, his place will be taken by the man who would have stepped down, Pascal Lamy.

But if this is short-term stuff, no better indication of how little the individual matters in the great scheme of things – much less the posturing donkeys in the EU parliament – come from yet another conference on defence issues, this one in Brussels devoted to considering: "Is maritime Security Europe’s Achilles Heel?"

Amongst the offerings from the speakers was the view that "the EU needs a maritime security strategy, not one limited merely to the territory of member states, but something encomapssing the whole range of actors required to enforce it."

And, says DefenseNews - an increasingly invaluable source – in pursuit of this, next year EU officials are expected to offer a new proposal to trace shipments from their origins to their ports of destination – a plan which may include measures for the physical protection of the supply chain against terrorists.

Now, note the phraseology: not, "commissioner so-and-so", but "EU officials are…". The system goes marching on, no matter who is at the helm.

What particularly concerns the commission is that there are two many "actors" in the maritime security chain, and "too many national players who are monitoring the same maritime areas, independent (sic) of one another." So says Christian Dupont, head of maritime security at the commission’s Energy and transport directorate.

Note again, this is not a commissioner speaking, but a "lowly official". And did you know the EU had a "head of maritime security"?

Says another official, Ronal Vopel, at the commission’s enterprise DG,

We've established the EU’s right to define territorial waters for the purposes of ship pollution control, ship safety and fisheries policy. The next step is littoral security and that points to coastguard and naval issues.

A few weeks ago we were told that the great hope for the European Union lay in its fresh, new (well, give or take some second-hand politicians) Commission. Now we are told that the great hope for the same Union lies in the fact that the European Parliament would probably not have endorsed said Commission.

The vote, as we know has been postponed and the old Commission, under Prodi, stays on without, presumably, those members who have already departed for pastures new and green. Prodi himself must be feeling a bit like Mark Twain who wrote (and this is the true quotation):

“… the report of my death was an exaggeration”.

Britain is not the only country plagued with Russian spy scandal (ah the joys of nostalgia!). Poland makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity.

While we have been told that there is a new and rather large wave of Russian spies engulfing Britain and while a veteran of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service tells all who care to listen that the reports must have been written to order just as they had been during the Cold War (other veterans tell us that the West was, indeed, inundated with Soviet spies), the Polish government has been accused of being under the control of Russian agents. Well, indirectly, anyway.

The story concerns a meeting between a known Russian agent, Wladimir Alganov, and a Polish businessman, Jan Kulczyk. During their conversation Kulczyk boasted that he had control over many of President Kwasniewski’s decisions.

This news was enough to turn popular opinion against him. 44 per cent of those asked said that the story made them revise their opinions downwards, though 36 per cent said that it had made no difference at all. Presumably, their opinion was low, anyway. Rather oddly, 5 per cent thought that the story made them think more highly of the President.

According to the Polish newspaper Rzechpospolita

“Other politicians also lost support as a result, including Wieslaw Kaczmarek from the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and, surprisingly, Roman Giertych from Polish Family League (LPR).”

Kilroy has spat out his dummy and resigned the UKIP whip, claiming that he can no longer work with the parliamentary party. This vitually blows apart any chances he has of gaining the leadership of the party - not that he had any anyway, and puts him in the EU parliament as an independent.

Earlier in the day, from the floor of the Strasbourg parliament, he made an "intervention" on the debate on Barroso's commission, calling for a vote of confidence against Barroso, only to be shouted down by other MEPs and then having his microphone cut off - whence he continued shouting out his message from the floor.

From his status as the prime asset of UKIP, therefore, Kilroy has degenerated into their nightmare member, leaving the Conservatives happier about their general election prospects than they have been for months. Rarely can triumph so quickly have turned to disaster.

There was a time, not that long ago, historically speaking when Britain was the most powerful country in the world, infinitely more powerful than the United States is now. Who became the country’s Prime Minister affected large chunks of what might be termed the developed and underdeveloped world in the nineteenth century. Yet, I have never read the slightest reference to other countries or prominent individuals claiming the right to interfere or make decisions about the way the British people or, at least, those of them who had the franchise, voted.

For some bizarre reason, however, America’s strength and influence seems to encourage all sorts of people to think that they have the right to interfere in what is a purely domestic matter: the election of the President. We have had calls from various international worthies that others, apart from Americans should participate in the elections. Presumably, the hope there is that those “others” would vote for Kerry, though, as the old song said: It ain’t necessarily so.

Besides, which countries would vote? Zimbabwe? China? Libya? Cuba? Or any one of the thousands of others that do not precisely vote for their own government? Curiously, the supporters of this idea of a “global election” in the columns of our own Guardian and Independent do not call for the British people to have some sort of a control of the legislation that pours into this country. We are not talking about the great influence the American President may or may not have on the world’s affairs but on the fact that about eighty per cent of our legislation appears as part of the unrolling managerial governance of the European Union, with no democratic control or accountability and no clear understanding, even, how it happens. That, it seems, does not matter. But then, it is not the people that would be taking part in this “global election”, one assumes, but the right-minded transnational organizations and individuals, the self-appointed would-be rulers of the world, who hate anything that smacks of liberal democracy.

The Guardian has surpassed itself. Its columnist, Charlie Brooker has not only described Bush’s presidency as being full of “idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed” (didn’t hear much from C. Brooker on the subject of unwarranted bloodshed in Saddam’s Iraq or in many other countries, and as for arrogance, there is nothing to beat a Guardian columnist) and prayed to God to provide the world with another assassin. After a couple of days the Guardian had to apologize or half-apologize, explaining with a knowing smirk that it was all post-modenist irony, implying that it was those humourless Yanks who complained. My own suspicion is that calling for the assassination of a world leader and a democratically elected one at that, was too much even for that newspaper’s readers. The few Americans who noticed the column all seemed to say the same thing: “Well, why don’t you come and do it, you great sissy?”

Then there was the website. I imagine most of our readers know about the Guardian website, on which it provided names and addresses of electors in Clark County, Ohio and urged its readers to write to said electors, urging to vote for Kerry. Needless to say, the Republicans of Ohio did very well out of this. Their support increased manifold and Bush may well take that state. The website had to be discontinued within 24 hours.

It is the sheer arrogance of the whole enterprise that leaves one speechless. What would have been the reaction of those journalists if, say, during the Hartlepool by-election, readers of the New York Times or the Boston Globe or, for that matter, Le Monde or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had started writing to the electors, urging to vote for one or t’other of the candidates?

It is not only our own believers in the transnational government of the great and the good, otherwise known as bowing to international opinion, who seem to have a slightly odd idea of what elections are about. Yesterday’s International Herald Tribune asked twenty international worthies what they thought the priority of the incoming administration should be. The Trib being an American paper, though published in Europe, at least did not ask those worthies to choose the next President.

Not that these opinions matter much. I doubt whether either Bush or Kerry have heard of Alain de Botton, a minor British writer, or of Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian MEP, whose undoubted achievement is the chronicling of his colleagues’ creative expense claiming habits.

Herr Martin, incidentally thought that the new administration should spend more time enhancing the development of the European political union, not push for Turkey’s membership and generally accept that what the EU does is right in all circumstances. He said:

“You need a stronger partner to combat world poverty, to combat terrorism, to solve the Middle East problems.”

“What was wrong? That it was the decision of one person in the country. If it’s the decision of one person or a group of people who are under him, for me a personf from the former Soviet Union, it’s a real threat.”

At least we know what might cause a crisis in what some in the media erroneously call the EU legislators, the European Parliament. No, it is not the lack of democracy or political accountability in the whole system. Much they care about that. No, it is not the corruption and venality either. Hey, whom are you calling corrupt and venal? I just take the expenses that I am entitled to according to the system.

However, let a would-be Commissioner express unfashionable views on social and ethical matters and …. well, it depends what the views are. Should a devout Muslim say that he thinks all homosexuals should be stoned, there would be sighing and shaking of heads but a general plea to be more understanding and not to discriminate against other people’s religion and culture. Must not make people feel unwanted.

If, as in this case, a devout Catholic says that he believes homosexuality is a sin, though he does not think it should be made illegal and, to top his crimes, adds comments that he thinks legislation of that kind should be left to the member states; if he then proceeds to explain that he thinks families should have two parents, and women should look after the children; well, then there is a crisis.

Lack of democracy we do not mind; corruption we accept; freedom of speech is something else. Up with that we shall not put.

Incoming Commission President Barroso has asked for the European Parliament vote on his Commission to be postponed as he rearranges his team. MEPs cannot vote out indidividual Commissioners, only the whole lot. The way the numbers stacked up, there would have been 362 votes against it with 345 in favour. Barroso is going to have to do some fast thinking and negotiating. So far, it seems, Buttiglione has refused to bow to the pressure and change jobs. Quite quaint really. The man seems to think that he is entitled to his opinions, that were, in any case, dragged out of him by some self-righteous MEP. Furthermore, they are shared by a large proportion of Europe’s population. They will all have to be re-educated if the likes of Baroness Ludford, the Lib-Dim MEP, have their way.

The Netherlands is one of the very few countries in the world that has never had a referendum. It will do next March or April on the EU Constitution and there are worries aplenty.

On the surface, what could possibly disturb the Dutch political consensus – quite self-righteous but pleasant with it, fairly successful and certainly European minded. Surely, they will vote for the Constitution.

It seems there may be some doubt on the subject. For one thing there are welfare reforms being pushed through in the Netherlands as in numerous other Continental countries. This makes the right of centre government somewhat unpopular. Then there is the worry about Turkey’s membership of the EU, though one can’t help feeling that the media over-eggs that one. The whole problems is so far in the future that few people can possibly care about it now.

Above all, there is the now familiar dissatisfaction with the political establishment, which showed itself most clearly in the 2002 election when the liberal but anti-immigration Pim Fortuyn’s party won several seats in the parliament, despite its founder’s assassination by a somewhat deranged green activist.

In other words, even the Dutch electorate is unpredictable. Of course, the political establishment insists that “referendums are not necessarily about the central issue but might be a judgement on other matters”. Indeed so, but, in many ways the whole debate about the Constitution, its creation and content have come to crystallize the problems with a political class that is ever more distant from the people who ought to be providing its power base.

Meanwhile Spain, who will hold the first referendum on February 26, has kicked off the yes campaign with the rather odd slogan of “Being First with Europe”. Spain, unlike other member states, feels it has done well out of the EU and her people are, by and large, europhile. The main parties support the adoption of the Constitution, more or less, though Aznar’s Popular Party had tried to win a better voting position.

Other parties have some reservations as well, and the United Left have adopted the slogan of “Europe Yes – but not this way”. (A little like our own No campaign.)

So far, The EU’s popularity has stood high in Spain. According to the latest eurobarometer poll, 87 per cent of the population see themselves as European citizens and 85 per cent think that the EU has been good for Spain. And so it has. The crunch may come during the next budget talks. Until now, Spain has managed to hang on to all the various subsidies it has extracted from the EU over the years. But Spain has been a member for 18 years and is deemed to be a huge success. There are ten new members that are considerably poorer. Why is “successful” Spain still getting such a large share of the hand-outs?

Another problem may well be brought by the Socialist government on itself. Few if any in the country know what is in the Constitution, but ministers think that Spain has now come of age and her people should know what it is they are going to vote about. Those ministers might find their calculations upset. The people may not like what they read in that Constitution.

Following the story in The Business about the US developing satellites to shoot down the EU’s Galileo satellites if they were used by a hostile power – like China, the news agency AFP asked for an official comment from the Chinese authorities.

A story was duly posted on EU Business this morning, relaying a complete denial from the Chinese that they intended to use the system for anything other than civilian purposes.

However, even though the story is still flagged up on the Google news site, the link is no longer functional and EU Business reports that the entry has been “removed”. They really, really do not want this issue discussed.

It is a bit rich of The Times, in its leader today, to call for "the debate to begin" on EU asylum and immigration policy when it, like most of the media, has been seriously derelict in its handling of EU affairs for years.

Nevertheless, we can welcome some of its comments on the issue, when it observes that "the way the debate has been conducted, or not conducted, is a disgrace", adding that "too much European policy is kept secret for fear of stirring embarrassing debate."

And quelle surprise, the mighty Thunderer believes that the secrecy is "undemocratic" and that, on this issue, "the Prime Minister is being less than straight."

Despite all this, this leader and few other newspapers add much light to the issue and we hold to our opinion that the media – and Conservative politicians – are missing the point.

We ourselves laboured to understand the position but it seems pretty clear that the opt-out negotiated at Amsterdam is a cast-iron protection against having to adopt EU policy – if the government chooses to take advantage of it.

That, in fact, is the central question: not what the EU might impose on us but what our own government is prepared to accept voluntarily. And, as we see with the commission communications adopted last Friday on terrorism, the devil is in the detail – which the newspapers generally rarely think worthy of reporting.

As we stand, however, nothing has actually changed. If anything – despite the posturing of David Davis, the government's position accords almost entirely with the Conservative idea of a "live and let live Europe". How many times have we heard Howard say that if the other member states want further integration, then we should not stop them, as long as they do not want us to follow?

Well, by removing the veto, our colleagues can make policy under QMV until their hearts are content, but those policies do not apply to us unless the government makes a specific decision that they should. This, there is no surrender of sovereignty in the action of giving the colleagues their QMV. The surrender will come later, in dribs and drabs, as the government opts in, usually on technical and obscure issues, which by themselves mean little but, cumulatively, add up to major losses of sovereignty.

By then, of course, the media will have gone back to sleep, which is of course, what the government and the "colleagues" rely on. To that extent, the government does not need to keep its European policy secret. The media, quite voluntarily, has been doing that job for years, thus acting as a tool of government. All the signs are that it will continue to do so.

No sooner have the interior ministers of the EU agreed on an ambitious long-term framework for integrating the fight against terrorism (though there seems to be somd doubt as to whose definition of terrorism they will use), but they are disagreeing in private.

According to Agencia Giornalistica Italia, the Italian Minister of Interior, Giuseppe Pisanu, said that the right of initiation should stay with the separate ministers. The role of Gijs de Vries, EU anti-terrorism co-ordinator, should be just that: to co-ordinate.

"We must be careful, and avoid entrusting the coordinator with these duties, for which he holds no jurisdiction", he said on the sidelines of the European Council for Interior and Justice Affairs. "Initiative powers as regards anti-terrorism measures belong to Interior Ministers, operational ones to EuroPol. The Coordinator must coordinate different activities".

Definitely in the category of WGAD, the little groupescules are still getting excited about the fate of Barroso’s commission, whether Rocco "gay-basher" Buttiglione is going to survive the wrath of the EU parliament, whether the dismal lot are going to exercise their "nuclear option", and whether Prodi is going to resuscitate his team from the political morgue in order to run as a "caretaker commission".

With various news agencies excitedly reporting that "Barroso's new commission team faces a knife-edge vote", with the outcome of the vote "impossible to predict", the only sensible response is: "who gives a damn?"

What is particularly laughable, though, is talk of there being "a power vacuum" if the Barroso commission is voted down. Readers of earlier Blogs on the Hague Programme will have noted that it is a five-year "multi-annual programme". The budget is also "multi-annual" – so it the research framework programme, the CAP – and even fishing.

The machine goes chuntering on regardless, and it makes not one whit of difference what commissioners the parliament approves – or for that matter which MEPs are elected. We could do without them for five years and no-one would notice the difference.

I might have mentioned this before, but I recall that one of the interpreters in the parliament once told me that the MEPs were so predictable in what they said that the staff up the boxes, having to spew all their garbage out in the many different languages, felt that, given the titles, they could deliver their speeches for them.

That would probably be the best outcome for this little faux crisis – get rid of the plonkers and let the middle-men take over. At least then we could cut out the crap of them posturing about being democratic and save a bit of money.

A recent report in DefenseNews appears to pour cold water on the ambitions of the EU to have its own space programme, encompassing both civil and military dimensions. The report, covering a conference held recently in Paris, suggests that "lingering sovereignty issues" make this unlikely.

The conference itself, on 30 September, was devoted to the highly technical subject of "Space Imagery in the Service of Defense and Security," organised by the Foundation for Strategic Research. Various officials attending the conference said that progress in harmonising European nations' strategic interests still had a long way to go.

But Col. Yves Blin, deputy head of the space office in the French joint defence staff, gave the game away, saying that, "I don't imagine we will have a common EU imaging system in the next ten years." "Governments will co-operate, perhaps in association with the EU. But the EU will not own the system, because strategic intelligence is not shared, it is exchanged."

Nevertheless, in the past five years, the French have compiled a document, called Common Operational Requirements, that attempts to harmonise the space-based defence needs of European nations, and a half-dozen EU member states, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain, have signed the document.

On that basis, while dismissing the idea of immediate integration, Blin did not rule out full integration after ten years. Bearing in mind that it cannot happen until after the constitution has been ratified, and there is much technical preparation work to complete, a ten-year plus programme is not unrealistic, and is but a short time for commission programmes.

Already, France, Germany and Italy are sharing data from their own military network of satellites, while the Galileo satellite constellation and other sapce assets will be EU-owned, facilitating the march of integration.

Meanwhile, according to ISR Journal, the US Defence Department has upgraded its ability to keep tabs on the orbital environment, and is considering further upgrades in the US space surveillance capabilities.

The National Security Space Office is working to raise the awareness of space control throughout the military and plans to brief Air Force Undersecretary Peter B. Teets at the end of this month, on the results of several recent studies on what it will take to achieve it.

Currently the U.S. military relies primarily on ground-based telescopes and radars for space situational awareness. Improving U.S. capabilities in this area will require upgrades to these assets as well as deployment of space systems such as the Space Based Space Surveillance System, now in development, and the Orbital Deep Space Imager.

And, effectively confirming the capability of the US to down hostile satellites, the Strategic Space 2004 conference held in Washington earlier this month, Air Force Maj. Gen. William Shelton, director of policy, resources and requirements at U.S. Strategic Command, said that "a debate would take place” before the Pentagon deployed any anti-satellite weapons."

So Blunkett has gone ahead and done it – he's agreed to allow QMV for "Title IV" of the Treaty of the European Union, thus extending the Commission's powers in respect of "visas, asylum, immigration and other policies related to free movement of persons". (See previous Blogs: here, here, and here.)

For sure, the UK does have an opt-out, but Blunkett has made it clear that he will accept some of the proposals, and the Council has also accepted the Hague Programme, also known in Community jargon as Tampere II, which has some pretty horrendous implications.

But, as we are constantly finding out, this is by no means the end of it. Last Friday, without any significant publicity that I can discern, the EU commission adopted four more of its Communications on combating terrorism, reinforcing its "anti-terrorism action plan" which was adopted by the European Council in June last year. These too are being discussed by Blunkett and his fellow ministers during their meeting in Luxembourg.

Strangely, none of these communications seem to have been published yet, and the details in the press releases are disconcertingly vague. However, these seem to be all that is available, and they can be read from here, here, here and here.

The first, entitled: "Prevention, Preparedness and Response to terrorist attacks", sets the framework of the new EU plan against terrorism, proposing the "notion" that

…the fight against terrorism must be not only integrated – bringing all different policies together – but also inclusive - including all social, economic and political actors. It proposes a novel way of involving citizens, civil society and Parliaments on a reflection on how to reconcile the different objectives and concerns involved in fighting terrorism.

We all know politicians live in a different world from the rest of us, but you’d think they might pay some attention to what goes on in the political dimension. Clearly not as far as Pierferdinando Casini, the Speaker of the Lower House in the Italian Parliament is concerned.

Hosting the 5th Italy-Russia Parliamentary Conference, he said the following to his Duma counterpart, Boris Gryzlov, who, back in Moscow, is essentially Putin’s messenger boy:

“The EU - especially Italy - supports a democratic Russia as a rightful member of the wider European community; as such Russia has a right to aspire - by means and at times of its choosing - to intensify procedures for its closer participation in the construction of the European community.”

“Your great country is instrumental to the stability of crucial quadrants of the world in view of its historic influence over parts of the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Your diplomacy has succeeded in unravelling difficult situations, such the transition in Georgia. [...] What matters most is Russia's irreversible commitment to democratising politics, to access the free market, and to pursue euro-Atlantic integration. Not an easy choice and not one that can only be implemented gradually thanks to a greater awareness among the Russian people and thanks to the firm commitment of the Duma.”

One of the problems with the EU is that it is not only the politicians that benefit from the gravy train. All sorts of hangers-on enjoy a status from being associated with the "project" that would not otherwise come their way, creating a broad salariat with their noses in the trough.

A good example of this is a recent, stomach-churning "briefing" from the Westminster Press and Parliamentary Office of the Federation of Small Businesses, which describes in gushing detail the recent visit of a delegation, headed by National Chairman Carol Undy, to the EU parliament in Brussels.

There, the assembled members hosted a keynote briefing session for MEPs. The briefing then advises members that:

Some 40 percent of new regulations affecting business coming from Brussels and Britain’s leading business organisation used the event to call on MEPs to renew their efforts to ensure the EU is the world’s most dynamic economy by 2010.

For over a year now, three organisations, the Friends of Europe (Brussels' liveliest think-tank), EurActiv and Gallup Europe, have been pondering on why the EU is so unpopular, and seeking ideas of how it could improve its image.

Amongst other thing, it conducted a detailed survey of 3,500 “opinion formers” including, I have to admit, myself. However, as to the question on how the EU could improve its image, it clearly did not appreciate my response, which was along the lines of “abolish itself”.

Instead, the triumvirate have published a 35-page report which it has now distilled down into what it claims are "ten key recommendations" to assist Margot Wallström in her new role of communications commissioner.

It suggests that Wallström should visit all member states during the first six months of her term "to listen to citizens' views of the EU, find local supporters and beneficiaries of EU integration and meet national media representatives and leading policiticians."

She should promote the benefits of EU membership by researching and professionally communicating the advantages for citizens of their country belonging to the EU. Furthermore, popular 'good-will ambassadors' should be employed to promote the benefits of Europe.

The triumvirate also offer Wallström the advice that she should keep the message simple by cutting back on boring detail. She should encourage the media to report on political differences at EU level and react more quickly to events by setting up an EU newsroom to feed international media with up-to-date footage on EU developments.

And, of course, from the school of the fully paid-up jolly, she should invite journalists to Brussels for intensive training courses on EU reporting. She should establish better contacts with national and regional media and streamline the EU's communication and reporting structure by getting institutions to co-operate more closely and cutting down on administrative hurdles.

Finally, it argues that the commission should adopt a decentralised approach by making national governments responsible for communicating EU policies and setting up "Communications Task Forces" at member state level.

Actually, these seem somewhat more than ten points but, whatever the number, they are so pedestrian that one wonders why the triumvirate bothered. Clearly, the group has very little idea how to deal with the issue they are addressing. One wonders, for instance, what Wallström can achieve from a whirlwind tour of the all the member states in six months – one every week - and how many "citizens' views" she could actually hear in that time, just supposing she ever got near a "real" citizen.

But, if there was needed a demonstration of how wide the gulf has become, and quite how impossible Wallström’s task actually is, one need only refer to the original report. In a puff for the Friends of Europe, at the end, it shows a photograph of a banquet scene where the assembled masses are huddled together in the main room of what is clearly a spacious hall, while the "great and the good" are not only at the "top table" but are on a raised stage and separated by a balustrade.

Says it all.

The Market Center Blog of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (the American spelling is real) presents an excellent overview of the ups and downs of the struggles between free markets and their enemies, mostly assorted states but, increasingly, various international, supranational and transnational organizations.

On Friday of last week, Dan Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation, posted a short piece about Ireland. He rightly lambasts a union official who is complaining that Ireland is engaged in a race for the lowest corporation tax. It is the low taxes, Dr Mitchell points out that has given Ireland a high growth, low unemployment economy.

“When Ireland was a high-tax nation, it suffered from 15 percent unemployment and endured some of the lowest living standards in the European Union. Since slashing tax rates and reducing the burden of government, Ireland has enjoyed a remarkable turnaround. The "Sick Man of Europe" is now the "Celtic Tiger," unemployment has plummeted to 5 percent, and Ireland is now the second-richest economy in Europe.”

Right at the beginning, when we started this Blog, we decided that we would never delete anything, and pretend it never happened (unlike the Commission with its own web site). If we (and by that, in this case, I mean "I") are wrong (Szamuely is never wrong, of course), we simply admit our mistakes and offer a correction.

I am thus grateful to Kenneth MacArthur, in his comment on my earlier Blog, who points out that the UK does indeed have an opt-out. This is embodied in Art. 69 which refers to the Protocol on the position of the United Kingdom and Ireland, which states that "the United Kingdom… shall not take part in the adoption by the Council of proposed measures pursuant to Title IV of the Treaty…".

It does look, therefore, as if Blunkett is right, in that the UK – notwithstanding that any new measures will be decided by QMV, the UK can still decide whether or not it wants to take part in any measure.

This is rather an odd position, in that if the UK (and/or Ireland) decide to opt-out, a measures will be decided by the qualified majority of the rest of the member states, the UK having no vote on the matter, although the UK does have the vote in making the issues – in general – subject to QMV.

On this basis, it looks like my Blog of yesterday on this subject was nearer that mark (although not without error) in that this is by no means the Armageddon situation painted by the Mail on Sunday. There are indeed other more important and pressing issues to hand.

Speaking of which – while I am in the mood for admitting my errors – I said yesterday that The Business did not publish its copy electronically. Of course, it does. The satellite story can be found here and the leader here.

Dominic Cummings, in his Blog notes that: "Rather amazingly, this story has, so far as we can see, not been picked up by any other media in the UK, though it has in Pakistan, India, Australia and elsewhere". Neither, might I add, has it been picked up in any significant way by the Eurosceptic movement – which is still absorbed in the Kilroy-Silk leadership bid.

And the BBC at lunch-time? Its lead was on the casino issue. One really does wonder sometimes about peoples’ priorities and values. Or perhaps we’ve got it wrong… again?

The European Commission has issued another document, this time a Communication, “on the role of standardisation to support European legislation and policies”. Its purpose is to take standardization that already exists as an agreement between various bodies and turn it into a legislative and regulatory structure, with an aim of trying to spread it beyond the borders of the European Union in the fullness of time.

How else is one to interpret the words:

“Today’s main challenges are efficiency in the traditional standardisation processes, international standardisation, the use of "new deliverables" and the maintenance of a strong standardisation infrastructure in Europe representing our interests also world-wide.”

“Standardisation is a voluntary process based on consensus amongst different economic actors (industry, SMEs, consumers, workers, public authorities, etc) . It is carried out by independent standards bodies, acting at national, European and international level. Originally conceived as an instrument by and for economic operators, standardisation has been used increasingly by authorities. Also the Community has made, since the mid-eighties, an increasing use of standards in its policies: first in the fields of technical harmonisation, ICT and public procurement, later also in areas such as environment, transport, energy, competitiveness, consumer protection, etc.”

Blunkett, according to The Times, today – and other sources – is insisting that Britain will not accept a common EU asylum and immigration system with its own processing centre, visas and border guards.

That much we know already but it now appears that the Home Office has confirmed that he is giving up Britain’s national veto on asylum policies.

From the way this is framed in The Times, "giving up the veto would mean asylum and immigration initiatives would no longer have to be agreed unanimously by the 25 member states, but decided by majority voting."

That clearly indicates that the "colleagues" are invoking Art 67, but confusion now arises with the government claiming that Britain would retain the right to opt out of any policies it didn’t like. This, it says, is tantamount to a veto.

On the Westminster Hour on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, MacShane was asked about this, and he referred to having negotiated an "opt-in", suggesting that any policy initiatives would not apply to the UK unless is specifically decided to adopt them.

Thus does the story get murkier and murkier, for there do not appear to be any "opt-outs" or "ins" written into the treaty. The only reference that would seem to be relevant is a Declaration appended to the Nice Treaty (No. 16), which states that the "Conference":

agrees that foreign policy considerations of the Union and the Member States shall be taken into account…

Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried a somewhat confused article with many different subjects and opinions from all sorts of people, whose main theme was how history is perceived. Or that is what I think its main theme was.

It focused on a most peculiar textbook that seems to have been published in Belgium by, we are told, the Belgian Office of the European Parliament, but with EU money. This is the first volume of Histoires de l’Europe and is intended for the country’s schoolchildren.

This is another twist in the ongoing saga of the European history textbook that will, ... well how shall I put it, ... exclude certain unpleasant aspects of European history. Like wars and conquestst and nasty people. In fact, all the things that make the study of history interesting.

This effort seems to have excelled itself. First of all, it is in French, which means that half Belgium will refuse to read it. Secondly, while incredibly lavish, it devotes four pages to each of the present and possible future members of the EU, even though the span of the volume is two millennia.

Not having seen the book itself and having to rely on rather waffly and hysterical journalistic accounts, I cannot quite tell how Belgium, which has existed since 1830 can merit the same number of pages as Britain. But, I suppose, half a page might have been devoted to Flanders and Burgundy.

The real problem seems to be the somewhat eccentric way of dealing with the twentieth century. (Well, apart from inaccuracies in dates, that is.) The Second World War is mentioned in the pages devoted to several countries but not, it seems, in those on Britain. The same goes for the First World War. The only thing of note that happened in Britain between 1931 and 1949 (formation of the Commonwealth and independence of India and Pakistan) was the arrival of Charles de Gaulle, clearly the only European who put up any kind of resistance to the Nazi (woops, no, they are not mentioned either) German invasion. Germany is there but apparently not the Nazis, though there is a throw-away comment that Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Somebody had to be Chancellor, I suppose.

Peter Thomas, director of the Belgian section of the European parliament’s Office of Information, explained that all this complaining is completely unnecessary as the book was just a textbook and was not scientific. No reason why a history book should be scientific, unless you happen to believe in scientific materialism, an ideology long past its sell-by date, but it ought to be historical. Or, in other words, it ought not leave out large and important chunks of the history it is supposed to cover. As this is volume I, perhaps, all the excisions will be in volume II.

The oddest thing is that before publication the book was sent round to all the ambassadors who gave their opinions. Clearly they did not reply in time as the negative opinion sent by the Hungarian and Turkish envoys to Belgium had not prevented the pages they disliked from being published. We do not know what the Hungarian ambassador objected to. Perhaps, the inclusion of Romania among European countries, perhaps an inability to spell Mohács or Székesfehérvár correctly. Whatever it was, the pages had to be torn out before the book could be sold to the Sunday Times journalist.

I call that rank amateurism. Why did they not have other pages to substitute? The whole thing ought to have been produced in the form of a loose-leaf file, so pages readers or potential buyers are dissatisfied with could be replaced with other, more congenial ones. These people should learn some history themselves. In particular, they ought to learn the well-known story of what happened when the relevant volume of the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia arrived at the homes of the subscribers, just before Lavrentiy Beria became an unperson. Every subscriber then received instructions to cut out the pages that had a long entry on someone who clearly did not exist, had never existed and could never have existed, and to substitute similarly numbered pages, which, quite properly, covered the Bering Strait in great detail. That is how these things should be done.

Not only has Greece spent double its earlier estimate, which, in itself, was higher than the original one on this summer’s Olympic Games; not only has the country's deficit shot up to 5.3 per cent of GDP (instead of the required 3 per cent), the Greeks are now facing an enormous bill if they want to keep the Olympic sites going or even standing.

According to Fani-Pali Petralia, the deputy culture minister (did ancient Athens have one of those?), estimates for how much it will cost to maintain the venues vary from €85 million (c£59 million) to €110 million (c£76.5 million), though as AFP drily observes:

“Petralia did not specify whether the costs were for annual or long-term maintenance.”

Although The Business does not publish its stories on-line, an edited version of the leader in that paper, entitled "Hi-tech call to arms threatens military alliances", under the by-line of Fraser Nelson, is reproduced in the Scotland on Sunday.

Well worth a read.

The lurid headline in The Mail on Sunday today is perhaps a tad misleading. It may warm the hearts of yer average Eurosceptic to see "Surrender" emblazoned all over the front page, and the strap leaves little to the imagination: "After a thousand years of history, David Blunkett finally hands control of Britain’s borders over to Brussels… RIP Britannia".

But actually, I’m not sure they’ve got it right. Although the Mail doesn’t say so, this all relates to the Hague Programme, which was the subject of an earlier Blog. Referring to that document (link on the earlier Blog) one sees a clearer picture than the Mail provides.

There, one sees that this is the Amsterdam Treaty, writ large, as amended by Nice, the former introducing asylum policy for the first time, the latter making provisions for qualified majority voting. And it is in that context that the Mail is getting excited.

The point at issue is that, currently, decisions on asylum and immigration control must be unanimous but, in the Nice Treaty (Art 67 TEC) there is a provision for making decisions by QMV. This kicked in five years after Amsterdam came into force (on 1 May 1999), but it requires that the Council, acting unanimously, may decide to make these policy areas subject to QMV.

This is precisely what the Hague Programme is suggesting, followed by the approval of an Asylum Procedures Directive by the spring of 2005 at the latest.

However, Blunkett has already made it clear that he has no intention whatsoever of voting for the Art 67 procedure and, even if he did, there are more than a few of the other 25 member states who would vote against. Therefore, the provision is a dead duck and the Mail is being unduly alarmist.

Action on immigration and asylum will remain – for the time being at least – subject to voluntary co-operation, subject to the Geneva Convention of 1951, and the UK will retain its power to block measures of which it disapproves. Whether it will be robust enough is another matter, as the current government has an unfortunate habit of giving away too much when it does not need to – but that is another story.

Nevertheless, the Mail piece, however, is not without its danger. By overstating the case, it leaves itself (and the Eurosceptic movement) open to attack for being alarmist and – perhaps more importantly – in focusing in the emotive subjects of asylum and immigration, it ignores other proposals in the Hague Programme which are more sinister and certainly more dangerous.

One of those is dealt with today by Booker in his column, the insidious creep of backdoor police harmonisation – another issue also rehearsed in this Blog.

When you add up the programme for the harmonisation of civil and criminal law, the European public prosecutor, Eurojust and the development of Europol into a fully-fledged federal police force, there is much to be concerned about, which the Mail is not addressing.

Thus, while the point is made that the EU is starting to implement the constitution before it has been ratified, the points made in our Blog are not addressed. This incremental programme of further integration is far wider than justice and home affairs, and is something about which the media should be screaming.

However, the failure of the media to spot a good story is legion, so hats off to Allister Heath in The Business for picking up on the story that the Pentagon is prepared to shoot down EU satellites. Now that really would have been worth a splash headline on the front page of the Mail. Instead, as it does so often, it seems to have missed the point.

According to the Sunday Telegraph and repeated by the two rivals Reuters and Bloomberg, as well as the indispensable Xinhuanet, Tony Blair has decided to hold the UK referendum on the EU Constitution, which will be signed by the leaders of the member states next week in Rome, in mid-March 2006.

This puts Britain among the latest of all the countries to hold the plebiscite but, to be fair, it is the earliest possible date. In the next two years Blair has to juggle a general election, a referendum and the six-month presidency of the EU, the one immovable object among the three.

With the presidency from July 1 and December 31 2005, six months are effectively taken out of the calculation both for the election and the referendum. Were Mr Blair to call the referendum first, say, in the spring of 2005, there would be a serious danger that it would become one on his premiership. Untroubled by the need to elect an alternative, an already sceptical populace would probably vote a resounding no, thus forcing Blair to shoulder the presidency in somewhat adverse circumstances.

It is, therefore, reasonable for him to get the election out of the way first. As things stand, he is likely to win it, though by how much and whether things will stand the same way in May 2005, the almost certain date of it, are all matters that remain necessarily unclear.

From Mr Blair’s point of view a referendum immediately after a successful election might seem ideal. Actually, that could go either way. Voting in Labour again may simply mean that the Conservative Party does not appeal as a possible government-forming one. A referendum immediately afterwards would give the historically bloody-minded British electorate a chance to kick both parties.

No sane prime minister would agree to a gruelling campaign in the middle of what is likely to be a somewhat tense presidency. That leaves 2006 and the sooner the better. Mid-March, therefore, sounds good. Of course, much will depend on other referendum results that will start trickling in during 2005 and on what happens during the presidency.

Then there is the other problem: what to ask. Blair has, at various times, committed his government to referendums on the constitution and the euro, if Gordon Brown finally gives the thumbs up. It seems that some members of the Cabinet, including Alan Milburn, the chief election strategist, as well as the new Commissioner Peter Mandelson, want to make the constitution referendum a double one and to ask the electorate at the same time whether they would be in favour of Britain entering the single currency “if it is shown to be in the national interest”? Presumably, the hope is that the electorate, having been persuaded of the general goodness of the constitution and the European project in general, will then “sensibly” say: well, if they can prove that it is in the national interest then I am for it. And, having got the coveted yes vote on both questions, pressure can be put on Brown, still presumably Chancellor and still presumably warring with the Prime Minister, to show that it is, indeed, in the national interest.

As plans go, it is not a bad one. There are too many imponderables to make it a good one, though. There is the general election result for one; then there is the inevitable further dissatisfaction with the Labour government, voted in (if it is voted in) for the third time only because the opposition is in disarray; the presidency might not be very successful and referendums in other countries might go the other way. The European Union will produce more unpopular legislation and throw its way about in its own inimitably cackhanded fashion. Parliament might refuse to have a single referendum Bill on both questions and the Electoral Commission will, almost certainly, object. And, most of all, Gordon Brown might not oblige.

There is one more possibility that will completely destroy the plan: despite the somewhat slow and unfocussed no campaign, despite the unseemly wrangles in UKIP, despite the Conservative Party’s reluctance to face the real issues connected with the EU, the electorate will deliver a resounding no to one or both questions in the referendum.

Meanwhile, we shall be living in interesting times.

Time goes on, meetings take place, negotiations end in nothing much, large sums are allocated. Yet nothing much seems to change in Darfur. Either the problem is insoluble or it needs a different solution.

The last solution but one was the African Union’s peacekeeping forces. This solution came to nothing, apparently, because despite the large amounts of aid that has gone to various African countries that have not improved their economy, the AU has no money for peacekeeping forces. Presumably, some of its members could withdraw some of the forces from the ongoing war in DR Congo, but nobody appears to be suggesting that.

Earlier this week the AU has proposed to increase its presence in Sudan from under 400 troops to more than 3,000. These will be tasked with guaranteeing security in an area that is described as being the size of Iraq and reining in the Janjaweed militias, something the government of Sudan (a member of the UN’s Human Rights Commission) has not been able to do, probably because there is a fine and easily crossed line between the militias and the Sudanese police and military.

The AU still needs money. EU foreign affairs supremo Javier Solana, at present in Addis Ababa has announced that the European Union will provide half the funds for the AU’s programme in Darfur, a matter of 80 million euros (c£56 million). Presumably, this sum, to be approved on Monday will be over and above the already allotted €130 or so million, supposedly paid out to help the people of Darfur.

It is surely not much to ask that some account be given of these large sums. Have they achieved anything? Shall we ever know what the money handed over to the African Union be used for? Who is providing the other half? And what of the situation in northern Uganda, worse, according to some commentators, than that in Darfur? As the late great Bernard Levin used to say, I only ask because I want to know.

The North computer has been under sustained attack for the last 24 hours, with a succession of unauthorised downloads which have interrupted my network connections.

Paranoia reigns supreme on these occasions, especially as I have had to deal with not one, but a series of "attacks", with new problems developing as fast as I clear the existing ones.

I have conducted a massive – and expensive – security upgrade and hope now that I can remain online long enough to resume postings. That leaves me to ponder whom we might be upsetting and, more interestingly, precisely why. But then, it could be a coincidence…

On December 2 a European Union force (Eufor) is scheduled to take over peace-keeping duties in Bosnia from the NATO stabilization force (Sfor). Although a NATO headquarters will reman in Bosnia under the current commander General Steven Schook and, although about eighty per cent of the Eufor troops will be the same as Sfor with different caps and badges, assuming they do not get too confused, the event is greeted as one of extraordinary significance.

Lord Ashdown, former Lib-Dem leader and present Lord High Everything Else in Bosnia, sounded ecstatic:

"For Bosnia, it marks a milestone on the route from war towards peace stabilisation and eventually joining the European Union."

"It's the biggest, most important realisation of the Common European Foreign and Security policy. It has to succeed because, upon this, the whole of the rest of the policy will be based.

"We've got to show we have the capacity to do hard defence, that we can provide the troops, the command and the decision making process to cope with the security situation. The future depends on success here."

To date, this Blog has avoided reporting on the twists and turns of the latest UKIP drama, not least because there are far more important things happening.

However, in what we fervently hope is the end game, we note the Sunday Telegraph today is reporting publicist Max Clifford saying that "Kilroy-Silk would be a useless leader for UKIP", describing him as "permanently orange" as a put-down description of his sun tan.

Unfortunately, he is probably right, given the lack of tactical skill Kilroy has displayed in mounting his leadership bid. Equally unfortunately, this does not necessarily mean that members of the current hierarchy are good leaders either.

However, with what few brain cells the current leadership can muster, one dearly wishes that they would get down to the task of fighting the EU instead of each other. As for Kilroy – he’s blown it. He can either knuckle under, or he can disappear, but he ain’t going to be UKIP leader in the near future.

Wim Kok, the former Dutch Prime Minister has chaired a group of experts (expertise unspecified) that looked into the Lisbon Agenda and how far it has moved. Unsurprisingly, the report that will be presented to the European Commission on November 3, just before the European Council meets in Brussels to discuss that Agenda, among other things, will be damning.

From the draft it appears that Mr Kok has described the Lisbon Agenda as being about everything and, therefore, about nothing. A fair point.

On the detail, the report will point out that job creation had ground to a halt in 2001 in most EU member states, though there seems no mention of the fact that almost all the jobs were in the public sector, anyway, and, therefore, non-productive. Only three EU member states have boosted spending on research and development to the target of 3 per cent of GDP. There seems to be no specification at this stage of which countries and whether the R & D is of the useful kind. Still research is research.

Finally, and most mysteriously, Wim Kok criticizes the EU countries for being well below the their Kyoto pledges on greenhouse gas emission. Whatever the Kyoto pledges may be about, it is not about growth. Quite the opposite. So, being below the pledges may even be a good thing, though with all the other problems, it clearly is not.

As the European Voice puts it:

“The report makes 21 recommendations about research, the internal market, innovation, labour reform and sustainability. Member states should decide by July 2005 how they will slash their administrative burden, implement financial services laws by the end of 2005 and take concrete steps towards making it easier for people to set up businesses.

The report calls on member states to be more accountable, finalize national action plans by the end of 2005 and appoint a representative to oversee the co-ordination of national progress.”

“With a team of only union leaders, big business representatives and an average age of 57, it’s not surprising that this bureaucratic solution has been reached.”

While attention was, quite understandably, focused mainly on the great constitutional drama during the meeting of heads of state and government in Brussels last June, we were not alone in warning that the constitution was not the only business at hand.

In our Blog of 22 June, we pointed out that dirty deeds were afoot, not least relating to the appointment of a European prosecutor, about which the government was decidedly shifty when questioned in the House of Lords.

But now it has come to pass that the full agenda has been revealed, in a document released by the Dutch Presidency on 15 October, which labours under the somewhat unwieldy title of "Draft multiannual programme: "The Hague Programme; strengthening freedom, security and justice in the European Union".

Known by its short title as "The Hague Programme", this is a stunning document, some of which contents are revealed today by The Times, under the front-page headline "Britain to give up asylum veto"referring to those sections which deal with harmonising asylum policy.

But this limited headline (and story) does not even begin to do the document justice. It essentially sets out the programme for harmonising and amalgamating civil and legal law, policing, and the administration of justice throughout the EU, in what is an unashamedly federalising move, clearly set on establishing a federal structure for justice, policing and related issues.

For all the claptrap from Prodi, Stephens, and others, about the march of integration being over, this is serious federalism, naked in tooth and claw.

What I find particularly offensive are comments (on page 3), where it is blithely declared: "The security of the European Union and its Member States has acquired a new urgency…", and then:

The citizens of Europe rightly expect the European Union, while guaranteeing respect for fundamental freedoms and rights, to take a more effective, joint approach to cross-border problems such as terrorism, organised crime, irregular migratory flows and smuggling of human beings as well as the prevention thereof…

The Treaty establishing a Constitution of Europe (hereinafter the Constitutional Treaty) served as a guideline for the levels of ambition, but the existing Treaties provide the legal basis for Council action until such time as the Constitutional Treaty Takes effect. Accordingly, the various policy areas have been examined to determine whether preparatory work or studies could already commence, so that measures provided for in the Constitutional Treaty can be taken as soon as it comes into force.

Perhaps overawed by the somewhat dubious honour of being the host of the signing of the constitutional treaty, due in Rome on 29 October, the Italians are now bidding to be first off the mark with ratification, perhaps before Christmas.

Franco Frattini, minister of foreign affairs, wants Italy to be "an integration flag", dismissing the idea of a referendum. According to a release by the government news agency AGI, the English version of which conveys a certain charm, the reason why the referendum is not thought necessary is that "majority of people understood this constitution does not create a European super-state, not a federal Europe. It does not mortify countries' identity."

One suspects that UK Europhiles will not be running around claiming that the constitution "does not mortify countries’ identity", although they might get better results if they did, just on the novelty quotient.

Minister, Bertinotti, Cossutta, however, goes one better in trying to attract the left wing parties, declaring (according to AGI), "Reading this document, without prejudices, left radical parties would understand that inside it there is a particular care for social policies."

Meanwhile, Spain has set the date for its referendum, to be held on 20 February of next year, on the back of an opinion poll that shows 56.9 percent of the population in favour of the constitution, 22.7 percent undecided and only 7.9 percent against.

With the French yet to set a date, however, their Greens have nevertheless all but decided to say "oui!. Green big guns, including the deputy mayor of Paris, Denis Baupin, former environment minister, Yves Cochet and mayor of Begles, Noël Mamère, are all backing a "yes".

The official decision, though, will not be taken until after an internal party vote on 21 November. If the vote actually produced a ‘non’ this could swing the internal socialist referendum, now due on 1 December. Nevertheless, a Green "non" vote is thought unlikely, which puts the British Greens in something of a quandary as they are formally allied to the French Greens through their European parliament political group.

However, the Greens are used to being two-faced on just about everything, so the schism should not trouble them too much.

Anybody who might have the slightest doubts about the US intentions in relation to the EU’s Galileo satellite constellation (see earlier Blog), should it represent a threat to their interests, might care to read US Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1, issued as recently as 2 August 2004, entitled "Counterspace Operations".

Not only does it make their policy very clear, in a foreword to the document, the Honourable Peter B Teets, Undersecretary of the USAF states that "space is the high ground" and talks about "denying that high ground to our adverseries".

In that same foreword, he also asks: "What will we do ten years from now when American lives are put at risk because an adversary chooses to leverage the global positioning system of perhaps the Galileo constellation to attack American forces with precision?"

Well, the answer has been given. Either jam it or shoot the satellites out of the sky. And there is no way that this should be considered to be bluff. The USAF has already developed a range of "micro-satellites" designed to "destroy enemy spacecraft", so small that ten can be loaded in a reusable military orbiter and despatched into space.

A test satellite, coded XSS-10, was successfully launched on 29 January 2003 and the contract to build its successor, XSS-11, with a more specific sensor payload already has been awarded. When Galileo finally takes to the skies, therefore, the Yanks will be ready and waiting to wipe it out of existence.

This really is quite an extraordinary situation, not least for the British government, which is co-partner in the Galileo project. It is still aligning itself with the EU commission in arguing publicly that Galileo is a civilian system but, if Taiwan does go "hot" at some time in the future, it will be in an interesting situation.

On the one hand, it will have to explain to its closest ally why it helped fund a space system that threatened American lives while, on the other, joining in with its "European partners" in expressing outrage at having its property blown apart by those American aggressors.

Should do wonders for the "special relationship" that successive British governments have so valued, doncha think?

It had to be the increasingly facile Spectator (prop. Boris Johnson) that offered the latest example of "Hidden Europe", in which a whole article is written about the adverse effects of EU policy, without mentioning the EU once.

The feat itself has been achieved by one Ross Clark in his article "Rubbish policies" in which he condemns "the government’s" recycling regulations as a waste of time and money. But they are not the government's regulations. They come from the EU.

The strange thing is that Clark admirably catalogues the effects the regulations, from the portion of the Cambridgeshire countryside where he lives, that has resembled Dante’s Inferno, the horizon punctuated by plumes of acrid black smoke rising from farmyards and corners of isolated fields as farmers burn their plastic waste in anticipation of new rules which are about to be imposed.

But in his search for the cause, he goes to DEFRA – and no further. "It’s the result of the government’s latest initiative on recycling and waste disposal", he writes, entirely ignoring the EU’s waste framework directive which the government is dutifully implementing.

"The rules for disposing of waste are becoming so tortuous, and the costs so unreasonable, that it comes as little surprise that farmers should seek to dispose of their farm waste in one last, nationwide bonfire before the new rules come in.

And so he goes on in this vein: "There is no greater source of pollution in modern Britain than the government’s environmental policy. They are all terribly well-meaning, these recycling schemes, these landfill taxes, all this licensing of waste dumps. The only trouble is that they are making things worse."

This is a very stupid man, an ignorant man – or worse. It is not "the government’s environmental policy". We have not had our own environmental policy since "environment" was introduced as a Community competence nearly twenty years ago with the Single European Act.

"Take fly-tipping", he adds. Yes, let’s take fly-tipping, you stupid man. The epidemic is directly a result of firstly the landfill tax and then the closure down the bulk of the toxic waste tips in the UK as a direct result of EU law.

Guess what. It has increased by 40 per cent in the past two years. Rubbish is being dumped in lay-bys, fields and woods at a bewildering rate. Between April and July this year there were 55,000 incidents of fly-tipping in Yorkshire alone. It isn’t just the countryside, either. There have been cases of gangs renting warehouses on business parks, filling them to the ceiling with waste and doing a runner.

Nice examples Ross. Pity you didn’t do your research and write a decent article around them.

Roughly speaking that is the headline in today’s Times about the ridiculous imbroglio at the European Parliament, whose members are threatening to vote out the entire Commission, for the first time in the Parliament’s history, unless something is done about Rocco Buttiglione, who had the temerity to express the straightforward opinions that he considers homosexuality to be a sin and that children are better off being brought up by two parents.

Let me recapitulate: the would-be commissioners have been interrogated by the various relevant European Parliament committees and, by and large, have done all right, though with several there have been reservations. The Greek Commissioner of Environment, for instance, did not seem to care about it very much and, much to the chagrin of several MEPs, had to be forced to promise to keep up the incredible barrage of legislation that his predecessor, Margot Wallström had managed.

Our own Peter Mandelson, needless to say, charmed everyone.

There have been particular problems with four of the candidates. Buttiglione is the one that had attracted most attention. The others are: the Danish Mariann Fischer-Boel, the would-be Agriculture Commissioner, whose husband owns and manages a farm, on which he receives a substantial subsidy under CAP; the Hungarian László Kovács, a former Communist apparatchik, whose knowledge of his allotted subject, energy, was somewhere between zero and minus five; the Dutch Neelie Kroes, who was supposed to bring business knowledge to the Commission but who has managed to give business a bad name by her extraordinarily extensive corporate connections and inability to see immediately that there could be a clash of interests for a Competition Commissioner.

Two cases of certain lack of honesty and clash of interests, one of complete ignorance and one of politically unfashionable opinions, that will not interfere with the work. So which one is the members of the European Parliament are particularly upset about? Up with what will they not put? Need you ask?

This one is a biggie. Well, relatively so, anyway. Once upon a time there used to be two EU summits a year, one at the end of each presidency. Then they started having unofficial summits, about half-way through each six-month session. These were so unofficial that they had no conclusions and no reports back to Parliament.

As time went on, these unofficial summits, called because something unexpected has cropped up that just had to be discussed by every head of government of every EU member state at the taxpayers’ expense, became more official. Somehow, imperceptibly, the two annual summits have now turned into four, and in the proposed Constitution, that number is set down as the one required for proper governance. Presumably, the next stage will be when unofficial summits will happen between the mid-term and end of term summits and, before we know where we are, there will be six or eight summits a year. Where will it stop?

There is a mid-term summit coming up on November 4 – 5, conveniently for those of us who are looking for a new and more modern guy for our bonfires, in Brussels. The agenda does not explain why it is necessary. According to the newsletter of the European Parliament, which informs us that the MEPs will be discussing the various items,

“Top of the agenda is immigration and asylum policy. Other issues include: review of the Lisbon strategy for making Europe the most competitive economy in the world by 2010; impact assessments of EU laws; enlargement of the EU (concerns Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey); and a strategy for 'communicating Europe' and its relevance to citizens' daily lives.”

Following our Blog on the Franz Fischler’s response to the Conservative Party policy of repatriating the CFP, there have been a number of excitable responses on the Eurosceptic sites about blowing Spanish fishing vessels out of the water, and sundry other mayhem, all of which rather misses the point.

The actual point is that, while the intention is to repatriate the policy, this does not necessarily mean excluding fishing vessels from EU member states from British waters.

Here, there is not only the CFP to consider but international law in general, and the question of grandfather rights. Fishing vessels from other states have had access to our waters long before the EEC was even dreamed of, and have acquired rights which transcend the current EU arrangements.

It would be unlikely, therefore, that the UK would seek to exclude these vessels and, for the time that it took to sort out new arrangements, the status quo in terms of access would almost certainly continue, not least because British vessels also have rights in waters outside our own exclusive economic zone – which must also be protected.

However, there are two other issues. Firstly, many of the species which abound in our waters are either not normally exploited by our fleets, or have limited commercial sales in this country. Hake is one and herring is another. Secondly, because of the run-down of the British fleet, there is not currently the capacity to exploit these stocks.

On both counts, therefore, it would not make commercial sense to exclude fleets which can profitably exploit stocks, and their access would almost certainly continue.

The central issue, therefore, is not one of access, but one of control. Instead of enforcing EU law, the fisheries protection service would again be enforcing British law and, inasmuch as we already have vessels (and aircraft) at sea enforcing fisheries law, very little actually need change. If we need more enforcement vessels quickly, we can do what the Icelanders did during the Cod Wars, and impress fast fishing vessels, with suitable conversions.

That notwithstanding, there is no reason to expect that vessels from other states would be unwilling to co-operate. The fisheries in the Falklands, in this context, is run by the Falklands Isles Council, with British support, but the main "client" is the Spanish fleet, which has an admirable record of compliance.

In UK waters, the problem with the CFP is not only that it is a common policy, but it is also a very bad one, poorly enforced. Following the example from the Faroes, where they have managed to "square the circle" and increase both the fishing effort and the residual biomass, it is not unreasonable to argue that, with better management, the decline in stocks can be reversed, affording much improved fishing opportunities.

In short, there are more than enough fish to go round, and every reason for continuing to allow foreign fleets into our waters, albeit with the rule better and more fairly enforced.

What will probably change is that foreign vessels would be required to pay a licence fee, to cover the costs of enforcement and to compensate for the economic value of the fish extracted. This is common in most commercial fisheries so the UK adopting this practice would hardly be exceptional.

In terms of our negotiations with current member states, such a regime would actually ease the way considerably. We would be able to offer three options. First, the status quo option, where the CFP continues. Secondly, the fishing states fight Britain’s repatriation. Thirdly, those nations co-operate with Britain to develop a new fishing regime under national control.

In the first instance, everyone gets the same share of a diminishing asset. In the second, the foreign fleets get nothing. In the third, they get a reduced share of an increasing asset, amounting to an overall increase "take" and improved, long-term profitability.

At a political level, the other member states will have to make decisions which best serve their own national interests. Given the three options, which one to chose is a "no-brainer". Repatriation would not only be in the interests of the UK but also in the interests of other nations which exploit our waters.

I thought it highly amusing that we should today read about a public transport strike in Brussels – from the Chinese press agency Xinhuanet.

One detects a certain smugness – if not glee – in their report as they retail how "The Belgian capital of Brussels was jammed with cars early on Friday morning", with the proletariat having to go to work by car, by bicycle or on foot, bringing chaos to the whole city.

And, with the exudations from Brussels about "human rights" in China, you can almost imagine the mask of inscrutability cracking as the Chinese hacks pounded their word processors, describing how "Local media reported that the labor union called the strike to protest the lack of communication within the Brussels public transport company, STIB, and to highlight what it calls inhumane conditions for workers."

They then complete the picture by adding that: "Belgians are currently troubled with strikes", noting that, "On Thursday, hospital workers across the country took to the streets or stayed home to demand higher pay and better working conditions. Belgian post office workers are threatening to hold a strike on Nov. 10 over their working conditions, local media reported."

Of course, nothing like that would happen in China, which is why all the good Europeans are so anxious to sell the Chinese military lots and lots of expensive, high-tech weapons - presumably produced under inhumane conditions in European sweat shops.

On 11 October last, there was an important conference at the Royal United Services Institute in London, on the "Future of Transatlantic Military Space Relations".

The purpose of the conference was "to examine trends in US and European military space development against the background of US, EU and NATO force transformations", to which effect a number of high power speakers were present.

An indication of how importantly this subject is now treated is indicated by quite how "high powered" these speakers were. They included Robert S. Dickman, Deputy for Military Space, US Department of Defense; Luc Tytgat, Head of Space Unit, European Commission; Major General C. Robert Kehler, Director, National Security Space Office, US Department of Defense; Gerhard Brauer, Head of Security Office, European Space Agency; and Major General Michael A. Hamel, Commander 14th Air Force, USAF Space Command.

Central to the discussions was the EU’s Galileo satellite positioning system, and the possibility that it could be used by potential and actual enemies of the US, in providing weapons targeting data and command and control systems. Central to the debate is whether the EU has the ability to – and/or is prepared to – shut down the system, or exclude particular users, in the event of an international crisis or actual hostilities.

These issues have been rehearsed previously in the Blog and I am indebted to Dominic Cummings of New Frontiers for his brief report of the proceedings – circulated today - which is highly disturbing, to say the least.

It appears that EU delegates admitted that they would not be prepared to turn off Galileo, even if it was being used militarily in conflicts with US, accepting therefore that the US could end up facing enemies using Galileo without any intervention by the EU.

What is equally disturbing was the US response, at the conference, with representatives politely pointing out that, if faced with this threat, that the US would "take whatever action it felt appropriate". There was a preference for "reversible" action (i.e., jamming), but, if necessary, "irreversible" action could be taken.

Private sources have told this Blog that the US is working on "killer satellites" and the inference is obvious – that the US would not stop short of destroying EU satellites if their interests were threatened.

This really is quite an incredible situation, with the EU and the British government still arguing publicly that Galileo is a civilian system, where privately, it is readily admitting that the system has significant military applications and is intended to underwrite the European Common Defence and Security Policy.

Yesterday, there was a debate in the Commons on defence, and one might have thought that this issue might have been raised, but perhaps that was too much to ask. Predictably, MPs were side tracked by the Black Watch deployment on Iraq and, what was generally a low-grade debate, nothing of this importance was even considered.

On a day also when the costs of MPs was heavily publicised (£118,000 each), one can only observe that, on their performance yesterday, they could hardly be said to be worth what they are costing us.

But it also has to be said – as we have observed before – that the Eurosceptic movement is letting itself down badly.

There can be few things more important, both in absolute terms, and in terms of national identity and the ability to run an independent foreign policy, yet the excitement of the morning – to judge by e-mails on the Eurosceptic discussion groups – was the confrontation, aired on the today programme - between Damian Hockney and Nigel Farage on the Kilroy bid for the leadership of UKIP.

Given also the silence of the media on strategic defence issues, my earlier piece headed "sleepwalking into disaster" is looking ever more prescient. It is time those in Eurosceptic movement woke up to what is happening, and started behaving like adults – or is that too much to ask?

According to Associated Press, Marta Andreasen has not wasted any time following her sacking last week, when she threatened to "spill the beans" on the commission.

Teaming up with former UKIP MEP Ashley Mote, to make a somewhat unlikely alliance – Mote being due in court next month to hear changes against him on housing benefit fraud – she has now delivered documents to the Serious Fraud Office in London, which she says supports a number of allegations about the EU.

Furthermore, she argues that the UK government is knowingly behaving in a fraudulent manner by paying money to Europe. Lack of financial control means some 95 percent of funds have not been accounted for and there has been no audit of the treasury for the last 14 years. Mote and Ms Andreasen also say there have been cover-ups within the EU hierarchy and money laundering by EU officials through a New York office.

Their action has been backed by leading barrister Leolin Price QC who suggests that, if no criminal action is taken, there is still the possibility of a civil case against the government.

A spokesman for the Serious Fraud Office said: "We have received documents which we are now examining. It is a preliminary stage to determine whether or not an SFO investigation should proceed."

Published in Fishing News this week is the response of outgoing fisheries commissioner Franz Fischler to Conservative claims that we can leave the CFP without leaving the EU. His view of the legal position is as follows:

As Community law currently stands (Article 3(1)(e) of the EC Treaty) the Community’s activities include a common fisheries policy whereby it holds exclusive authority on matters of fisheries resource conservation in both inland waters and at sea.

This exclusive authority as regards organisation of the sector and conservation of marine biological resources arises from Article 37 of the EC Treaty and Article 102 of the 1972 Act of Accession.

The Court of Justice has determined the range of the Community’s authority, confirming that it has replaced that of the member states in both Community waters and beyond these.

The Community’s exclusive authority where non-Community waters are concerned involves international commitments entered into with either individual countries (negotiation and conclusion of agreements) or groups of countries (Community representation in international fishery organisations).

The scope of the (CFP) was recently confirmed by Article 1 of Council Regulation (EC) No 2371/2002. Thus there are two aspects to the Community’s authority: it embraces live aquatic resources, aquaculture, and the processing and marketing of fishery and aquaculture products in waters falling under the sovereignty or jurisdiction of the member states, and covers all fishing activities in these waters, whether carried out by fishermen and vessels of the member states or by those of other countries.

It takes in all fishing by fishermen and vessels of the member states both within Community waters and on the high seas and within the fishing zones of other countries, in the latter instances in conformity with the rules of international law.

The regulatory corpus of the (CFP) is directly applicable in the member states’ domestic legal systems and takes precedence over their domestic laws. Accordingly, national authorities would be in violation of their obligations if they were to adopt legal acts setting aside application of the EC Treaty or of Community Law adopted under it. Nothing a member state does can affect the uniform validity of Community law throughout the Community.

The provisions of the EC Treaty can be modified only by a fresh treaty ratified by all member states.

Article 58 of the draft treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe makes provision for voluntary withdrawal from the Union but not for withdrawal from a specific Union policy.

It will be clear from that has been said that, as Community law stands at present and would stand under the draft constitution, a member state cannot depart from its obligation to apply the common rules adopted within the compass of the (CFP).

The Europhiles now have their own saint, in the revered Hugo Young who died last year. And to honour the Guardian’s "great political commentator", yesterday the Guardian hosted a memorial lecture at Chatham House, asking Philip Stephens of the Financial Times to deliver it.

Stephens chose as his subject: "Britain and Europe - unforgettable past, unavoidable future," and the full text of the lecture is on the Guardian website.

Dominic Cummings has written his own review of the lecture on the New Frontiers website, and a heroic effort is it. What we found interesting, though, was Stephens’ admission that: "From the very beginning those who march under a European flag have been less than honest about the nature of the bargain struck with our European neighbours and of the implications for national sovereignty."

He cites the 1971 White Paper on entry, which declared:

There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the general interest,

…for as long as the European Union remains a political battleground at Westminster, the Europhobic press and that part of our political establishment and public opinion still trapped in the past has a powerful lever against pro-European governments such as that of Mr Blair.

Actually, I am not at all sure Lord Pearson of Rannoch particularly likes the idea of sporting metaphors used in connection with his activity in the House of Lords (except for country sports ones) but that seems to me to be the best way of putting it.

In another short debate yesterday on the UK trade deficit in the House of Lords, during which Lord Dykes showed his ignorance of basic economic facts by suggesting that the British deficit and French and German surplus and export boom proved that we should be in the euro, Lord Pearson asked:

“My Lords, does the Minister agree that our trade deficit with the countries of the euro-zone is substantial, standing at perhaps record levels? If so, do the Government also accept that this means that the countries of the euro-zone have many more jobs dependent on their trade with us than we have dependent on our trade with them?”

“My Lords, I agree with one of the premises and not with the conclusion. I agree that we have a serious deterioration in our trade deficit with the European Union. It is matched by an increase in real effective growth in sterling against a basket of currencies. It is caused largely by higher UK growth, which means that there is an increase in imports from the European Union countries. That does not lead us to the conclusion of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson.”

A recent document from the Food Standards Agency, whose primary role may be to be a Food Scare Agency but whose most important task is the implementation of EU legislation and regulation in the UK, is entitled Consolidating and Simplifying EU Food Hygiene Legislation. It tells those who receive information from the FSA that on April 29 of this year a new EU food hygiene legislation was adopted and it will apply from January 1, 2006. That’s it.

The legislation was adopted after various consultations in Brussels and will be implemented by an agency that is not accountable to anyone without any open debate, outside what most people would consider to be the British legislative process. Only those deemed to be interested parties or stakeholders and those who have put themselves on that list know about it. Yet the legislation will be far-reaching and detailed.

In the introduction the FSA scrupulously gives the background:

“In July 2000, the European Commission published a package of five measures to update and consolidate the 17 existing hygiene directives. The package was intended to introduce consistency and clarity throughout the food production chain from 'farm to fork'.”

My thanks to all those who responded to my paper on the special relationship, which I delivered to the King’s College London European Society yesterday.

Although a mixed group of graduates and undergraduates, some strongly for the European Union and others opposed, the paper was well received, and there was remarkable unanimity on one point – that the issues raised were important and should be the subject of a wider public debate.

More than one person criticised the media for its lack of coverage of the whole subject of European defence integration. Others questioned the apparent lack of interest shown by MPs in strategic defence issues and one other made a very pertinent remark about how the whole of government now seemed to rely on keeping the population uninformed about vital issues.

As it happens, there is a debate on defence in the Commons today, but one fears that the focus will be on the deployment of the Black Watch to the southern area of Baghdad, and the strategic issues will be lost.

One issue which certainly should be highlighted by MPs – but my bet is that it will not – is the recent decision by the MoD to award preferred bidder status to the German MAN company for the supply of trucks to the British Army.

That decision looks more bizarre by the day, it already having been established a British firm, Multidrive of Thirsk, in one of the unsuccessful consortiums had won a contract to develop designs for the advanced Future Cargo Vehicle for the US Army.

It now transpires that the US aviation giant, Lockheed Martin, is to go into the military truck business, to capitalise on the billion dollar a year US military truck market and has chosen vehicles designed by Bristol-based HMT vehicles.

It seems there is no shortage of design talent in the UK, when it comes to military vehicles, which makes it all the more inexplicable that the MoD should go to a German firm, the trucks from which are, apparently, based on a thirty-year-old design.

Another piece of the jigsaw is fitting into place as well, raised in an earlier Blog, relating to the role of the electronics systems supplied with the vehicles, and the FRES project under way for the British Army. It was suggested that the choice of MAN as a supplier might in some way be conditioned by the need for the truck electronics to be compatible with FRES electronics, and that the MAN purchase might indicate a preparedness to go for European collaboration when the contracts are issued for the FRES hardware.

It further transpires that the lead firm of another losing consortium, Oshkosh Trucks, is working on the US Army’s Future Tactical Truck System, which will harmonise with the Army’s FCS, thus adding weight to the suspicions that the MoD, by rejecting the Oshkosh bid, has already made up its mind on European collaboration on FRES.

The only bet on this, however, is nothing of these details will be discussed by Parliament, nor by the media which is obsessed with trivia such as the adventures of Boris Johnson and the fate of the Kilroy-Silk leadership bid for UKIP.

Yet, as my audience yesterday would readily attest, it is a travesty that both Parliament and the fourth estate are so unwilling to deal with matters of substance. After all, with FRES alone, the government is preparing to commit £56 billion over term, which is no small sum of money.

We have remarked before that UKIP could have had a field day on this issue – if it could tear itself away from its perennial, internecine squabbling - and, as for parliament, it could take some lessons from the US.

While it is oh so fashionable to sneer at the Americans, and parade our moral superiority, Congress has held back $250 million of the £2.9 billion appropriation allocated for next year to fund FCS, until the Army provides more information on the system. Yet here, despite the serious political implications, we have yet to have a single debate on FRES, the UK equivalent.

With a few honourable exceptions, our MPs should be ashamed of themselves.

This slipped through during in the course of a brief debate as part of the Starred Questions that start the daily session in the House of Lords. Baroness Noakes asked Her Majesty’s Government whether, in the light of several UK tax cases heading to the European Court of Justice, they were satisfied that this country’s tax system complied with European Union law. Lord McIntosh of Haringey wriggled off the hook as the two cases have not been decided yet and he is not in a position to comment.

Baroness Noakes’s question seemed to refer to the fact that PricewaterhouseCoopers and other accountancy firms are encouraging businesses to take action against the government for setting certain taxes too high. If the judgement goes against the UK government, according to the noble lady,

“that will open up another black hole in the Government’s finances, which will mean either that the golden rule will be bust through extra borrowing or that taxes will be raised”.

“My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that, under the anti-discrimination clauses of single market legislation—particularly Article 44 of the TEC—the Commission or another member state could go to the court and claim that our direct tax system was discriminatory? If the court were to agree with that, would the Government accept that that would require us to change our direct tax system into a more European model?”

“My Lords, direct taxes have not been prominent in the issues raised by this Question. As the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, well knows, there are, at the margin, a few measures which are subject to qualified majority voting, but the only cases which have occurred in the courts have been the Fiscalis case and the Excise Movement and Control System case. If and when we are condemned by the European Court of Justice, we shall take appropriate action, but we have not been condemned.”

Red tape is costing UK businesses £100bn a year, according to David Arculus.

And who is David Arculus when he is at home? Ah… glad you asked. He is chairman of the mobile phone company O2, and now head of the Better Regulation Task Force. So here we go again. Tony Blair sees a problem so what does he do? He set up another bloody task farce – woops, sorry, force - chaired by the head of a huge corporation who knows exactly what burdens small businesses face, doesn’t he?.

Now, years later, Mr Arculus and his team, having laboured long and hard, have come up with the cost of regulation, but have they actually recommended getting rid of any? Silly billy! Of course not.

Retailing this story, The Daily Telegraph also cites Mr Arculus saying that £25 billion of that sum was spent enforcing rules, which is one of the reasons why regulations are so difficult to cut. The "mad officials" are doing quite nicely out of the regulatory business and they are going to make quite sure that their earnings are protected.

Nevertheless, city editor Neil Collins then asks: "Can anyone find a cure for this cancer of red tape?", noting that Mr Arculus's force has been at its thankless task for years. Perhaps a Fewer Regulations Task Force would be better, he writes.

But Mr Arculus does at least point out the source of much of the problem – "the flood of directives and guidelines from the Government and from Europe" – as if we didn’t know that. And he does offer some remedies: "An EU directive that businesses should trade fairly should replace all the regulations on butchers and bakers and so on," he says.

That is – as we pointed out in an earlier Blog - effectively, the same line taken by Lord Robens in 1972, just before we joined the then EEC and waved goodbye to any lasting chance of better regulation. The chances of the EU going for anything so straightforward as simple rules imposing general duties are exactly nil.

Thus, while Neil Collins might jokingly suggest that we get rid of Mr Arculus’s task force, he would do us a greater service if he suggested that we got rid of the real source of our problem.

Never let it be said that it is only important tyrannical and totalitarian states that the EU wants to be friendly with. Fidel Castro of Cuba is really not that important but he is a totalitarian oppressor and he is not liked by the USA. So we ought to be friendly with him, say at least some of the EU’s politicians.

Having been friendly with him for decades and achieving nothing thereby, the EU governments imposed diplomatic sanctions last year after a crack-down on dissidents (described as US-backed mercenaries by the delightful Castro government, whose prize member Che Guevara has once again become the pin-up hero of every bien pensant in Britain and Europe) and the execution of three hi-jackers. The EU, let us recall, is very strongly against capital punishment.

At the same time the embassies in Havana started inviting those dissidents who happened to be out of gaol to their receptions. But that was in the bad old days of Prime Minister Aznar, described as the “little Führer with the moustche” by the delightful etc etc (see paragraph above).

The new Zapatera government, on the other hand, says that sanctions do not work, while friendly relations might. They never have in the past, but few politicians like to be bothered with details. The Spanish government proposes to put an end to those symbolic links with the Cuban dissidents and is calling on other EU states to do the same. It seems that EU diplomats are reasonably positive about the idea.

Of course, they say, they will require Castro to improve his civil and human rights record (well, I suppose you can always have more than none, as Alice was told at the March Hare’s tea party) and if he does not, well, they might impose diplomatic sanctions again. Or not.

To be fair, other European, even Spanish politicians find the idea of rewarding Castro for doing nothing for political freedom, one of the supposed cardinal beliefs of the EU, somewhat repugnant. Still, he is a tyrant, he is anti-American. We ought to support him.

The House of Lords, the part of the British constitutional structure that still believes in doing its job of scrutinizing carefully legislation and amending it, if needs be, as well as producing copious and carefully argued reports on various aspects of EU legislation, the constitution and many other matters, is looking into the matter of its members’ expenses.

Peers do not get paid but they do get daily expenses when they attend the chamber. They also get miniscule secretarial allowances. As part of the reviewing exercise the House of Lords produced comparative figures on how much the two Houses of the British Parliament and the European Parliament cost. I cannot, alas, put the charts but I can quote the figures. Here goes:

The 2003-04 total costs for the House of Lords were £61.1 million, for the House of Commons: £269.2 million and for the European Parliament £712.5 million of which the UK, with 87 members at the time, contributed £89.7 million.

Costs per member for the 2003-04 session were as follows:
House of Lords: £91,000, House of Commons: £409,000, European Parliament: £1,138,000.

I hope everyone feels happy now. And just to add to the general discussion of value for money, I may add that in the 2002-3 session, the European Parliament sat 161 days, the House of Commons 162 days and the House of Lords 174 days.

Here is the full set of figures as given in a written answer in July of this year.

It looks like another confrontation between the UK government and the EU commission is on the cards – this one about the so-called "booze cruisers" and the UK’s reluctance to allow trippers to bring in unrestricted quantities of cheaper beer and baccy from abroad.

The commission is questioning the "disproportionate penalties", including goods and car seizures, that UK custom officials have applied to people returning home with large amounts of drink and tobacco. According to commission spokesman Jonathan Todd, the commission is going to decide today whether to refer the UK to the ECJ.

At the heart of the dispute is the "advice" from HM Customs that quantities brought in should be limited to a maximum of 90 litres of wine, 110 litres of beer and 800 cigarettes. The commission considers that these guidelines are indicative and should not be taken as a rigid rule by customs officials.

This is a tricky one for the Eurosceptic fraternity, as many benefit from being able to buy more cheaply abroad. But the issue is about sovereignty. The level of tax imposed on luxury goods like alcohol and tobacco is a sovereign decision of the nation state and the EU is effectively undermining the autonomy of the state by allowing citizens to circumvent the tax.

The loss to the Exchequer is variously estimated to be about £3 billion a year, which is no small sum, and what is lost in one sector must be recovered elsewhere. The EU is thus also influencing tax rates in other areas. Altogether, therefore, it is a choice between cheap booze or sovereignty – not a difficult choice: don’t you dare say "cheap booze".

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton takes both the American presidential candidates to task in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune.

According to her, the “European Union does not exist on the American political landscape” and searching through the two candidates’ campaign websites she came up with only seven mentions of the EU apiece. Of course, there may have been mentions of individual European countries but Dean Slaughter ignores that. She is merely astounded that so little attention should be paid to such an important player on the international scene in an election that is unusually centred on foreign affairs.

The trouble is, the international affairs it is centred on – if it is – are in the Middle East and the Gulf, where the EU has played an equivocal part to put it mildly. As far as Iraq is concerned what emerged is the complete lack of cohesion between all the member states.

Still, Dean Slaughter has a point: American politicians must start paying attention to this odd structure that is emerging as a political expression of all the international and transnational ideology that is determined to overcome liberal democracy. The problem is that she does not appear to understand much about it or be able to explain cogently why it is important.

These are the crucial arguments:

“Suppose the citizens of Ohio or Oregon or Alabama understood that the EU has a larger population and gross domestic product than the United States. That English is widely spoken as a second language. That most of the students who are either no longer applying to American schools or unable to enter the United States for a lack of a visa are choosing European universities instead. And that EU representatives are thick on the ground in many developing countries, both trolling for business and doling out aid and advice.

Suppose further that at a time when one of the most important issues in the U.S. election is which candidate is better placed to “win the peace” in Iraq and Afghanistan, American voters knew something about the EU model of building democracy – through assistance, admonition and accession negotiations. Americans would not likely believe that the prospect of EU membership, even if such a thing were possible, would have convinced the Taliban or Saddam Hussein to lay down their arms. But they might think that after the first flush of military victory the EU could teach America quite a lot about the exercise of civilian rather than military power.”

Tomorrow, I will be giving a presentation in London with the above title, subtitled: "How military technology is forcing Britain to choose between the EU and the US." Much of the text is based on material already published on this Blog, but this is my first attempt to put it all together. It will need refining, so comments would be appreciated from those willing to read what is rather a long piece.

At a time when, according to the headlines, Britain and the USA have never seemed so close – with the Black Watch on stand-by to go to Baghdad in support of US forces – it seems rather odd to argue that the special relationship between the UK and America is under enormous stress. But that is my thesis. In this presentation, I will argue that the relationship is, in fact, at the point of fracture.

The core of that thesis rests on several points but central to it is my definition of the "special relationship". This, in my view, is one forged during the Second World War and tempered throughout the Cold War, to the extent that it rests on our military alliance with the US and is underpinned by close military co-operation between the two countries.

That co-operation is most evident to the expert eye. The separate forces, for instance, share so much of the same tactical doctrines that they are virtually inseparable – the similarities being evident in the very equipment both armies use.The different main battle tanks of the British and US armies – the Challenger and the Abrams – are essentially the same in performance and capability. The British FV432 APC is but a copy of the US M113; the Bradley and Warrior MICVs are virtually identical, and the current tactical thinking, embodied in the FRES and FCS concepts, about which I will have more to say shortly, stem from the same minds. The equipment is defined by the purpose, the purpose is defined by the thinking and the thinking is the same.

The Royal Marines train alongside the US Marines, the SBS train alongside the Seals, the SAS alongside the US Special Forces, RAF pilots alongside USAF pilots. Ditto Navy personnel, where cross-postings on nuclear submarines are an essential part of the manning rostas.

Both forces have an active programme of exchange postings, so that a US-badged aircraft could just as easily have a British as an American pilot. We share equipment, intelligence and, at a strategic level, work as one. The early warning system in Fylingdales is part of the US network of global early warning radars, the AWACs system is an integral part of the US system – and uses US equipment. US fighters based in Britain form an integral part of the British air defence system.

In fact, when the Tornado MRCA project was delayed – the fruits of a European co-operative venture – and the RAF ended up flying combat aircraft with concrete ballast in their noses instead of working radar sets, apart from a few squadrons of Vietnam era F-4 Phantoms, the only effective air defence in the UK was the USAF F-15 fighter wing flying out of Lakenheath.

Thus far, then, the thesis stands, that the "special relationship" is underpinned by military co-operation, and this has translated into firm, joint commitments, most recently in Bosnia, in Afghanistan and in both Iraqi wars.

Now, there is an essential element here, which permits and indeed fosters this co-operation and makes a military alliance work. that boils down to one word: "interoperability". The forces must be able to operate together at a technical level.

At a pedestrian, but nonetheless important level, tanker nozzles must be able to fit the apertures of all the vehicles and aircraft they are going to refuel, irrespective of which force operates them. Fuel specifications must be the same, ammunition must be standardised so that it can be used in the weapons of the different armies, and so on.

Much of this technical harmonisation has been achieved through the aegis of NATO, the "NATO standard" having dominated military logistic planning for over four decades. By and large, the programme has been successful.

However, things are about to change. In fact, we are on the threshold of a military revolution which, in its own way, is as profound as the move from the musket to the rifle, or the horse to the tank, where technology is about to dominate the battlefield. The problem is which technology, built by whom, and whether different technologies are sufficiently compatible to allow functional interoperability.

This brings me to the heart of my argument, but I must first explain something of the military background which has brought us to the current situation.

That story essentially starts with the Second World War and the development of Blitzkrieg, the deployment of massed formations of tanks operating independently as armoured divisions, backed by air support which acted as forward artillery.

The Blitzkreig concept survived the war and became the dominant mode of conducting warfare, but with an increasing level of integration with infantry formations and self-propelled artillery. Integral infantry formations were, in fact, again pioneered by the Germans, with their Panzergrenadiers, riding Hanomag (SdKfz-251) armoured half-tracks, alongside the tanks, as early as 1939 in the Polish campaign.

The Allies came late to using armoured personnel carriers, the first significant deployment being in "Totalize" during the battle for Caen in August 1944, when "defrocked priests" – M7s (105mm howitzers mounted on M4 Sherman chassis, with the guns removed to enable troop transport) - were used to great effect.

But it was not until after the war that the concept of APCs really arrived, in both Soviet forces and in what then became NATO forces. The USSR first used what amounted to an armoured lorry, in the BTR 152, replaced by the eight-wheeled BTR 60, while the US forces adopted the tracked M113 and the British the very similar FV432.

However, although these armoured vehicles operated alongside main battle tanks, their essential role was of the "battlefield taxi", conveying troops to the battlefield where they fought dismounted. Not until the late 1960s did the Soviets introduce the BMP 1, first seen by the West in 1967, which embodied a turret mounted anti-tank weapon and rifle ports, which turned the humble APC into a fighting vehicle in its own right. Thus, the Mechanised Infantry Combat Vehicle (or MICV) concept was born. This was copied by the West Germans, in the Marder and then by the US with its M2 Bradley and by the British with the Warrior, allowing the infantry to fight mounted, alongside the tanks.

However, heavy armoured divisions, now in their final form, were already obsolescent, challenged by the development of increasingly efficient, hand-held anti-tank weapons, such as the RPG-7, and the light-weight anti-tank missiles such as the Sagger, which caused great slaughter of Israeli armour during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Nevertheless, the dinosaur of the heavy armoured division survives to this day, and these formations provided the backbone of the armed forces, even in the second Iraqi War. But things were already changing and this is what is creating the problem.

Basically, the strategic emphasis has now shifted from envisaging conventional battles with massed armour, operating from fixed bases, to expeditionary warfare, fought anywhere in the world, often at short notice, independently of established bases. Crucially, the emphasis is on "rapid reaction", which requires speed of deployment feasible only with air mobility. The heavy tank and the MICV are not suited for this type of warfare.

In their place comes the light, wheeled armoured vehicle, the general weight limit being under 20 tons, allowing transport by the military transport workhorse, the C130. However, threats are as great as ever, if not greater, so the challenge was to provide the degree of protection needed, without the weight. The answer is technology or, to be more specific, technology-generated intelligence, which would allow early detection and recognition of threats, with a stand-off weapons capability which could neutralise those threats before they came close enough to do any damage.

That is the Future Combat System (or FCS) concept, a $110 billion project, currently underway for the US Army, mirrored by a similar but less ambitious project for the British Army, called the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES).

Simple though the concept might be, execution is extraordinarily complex, requiring cutting-edge technology to be brought to the battlefield. The idea plays out at several levels.

Firstly, the combat area should be dominated by multiple sensors, providing real-time intelligence on all significant threats. Secondly, that information should be distributed not just to command level but to all combat formations, right down to squad level, giving what is called in the trade, "exceptional situational awareness". Thirdly, that system should be meshed into the command and control apparatus, allowing decisions to be made on accurate, fresh data. Fourthly, this should be linked to long-range "smart" weapons systems, to provide targeting and guidance information, and post-strike data. Finally, all of this is linked to an advanced logistics system which ensures that the right supplies are in the right place, at the right time.

Without going into too much detail about the hardware, the surveillance system alone ranges from satellites, to airborne surveillance platforms – both manned and unmanned – themselves equipped with sophisticated radars, infra-red sensors, high definition video cameras and other devices – to ground-based mobile radars, infra-red sensors, remote, and air delivered vibration detectors, as well as the "mark 1 eyeball".

The key to making all this work, over and above the technology behind the equipment, is "networking". The whole combat formation is linked by a vast computer system - the US system alone requiring 32 million lines of computer code to ensure functionality – analogous to the internet, so much so that the shorthand for the system is the "tactical internet".

Therein lies the seeds of destruction of the special relationship. Even between different US manufacturers producing components of the same system, technical interoperability is such a major problem that industry competitors are forming joint committees to iron out the difficulties. Between different nations, producing their own versions of the system, interoperability problems multiply. Only with the utmost co-operation, backed by political will to make that happen, can ensure that such sophisticated networks, produced by different nations, are able to talk to each other.

Crucially, that political will is not there and co-operation between the US and the UK is breaking down. What started the rot was the realisation by the US that technology released to its trusted ally, the UK, was being passed on to its EU industrial partners, and thence ending up in the hands of potential enemies, such as China – a problem known as "leakage". The concern has intensified with the adoption by the EU of China as a partner in the Galileo satellite positioning system (an essential component of any network), rivalling the US "Navstar" GPS system.

Gradually, for entirely sound reasons, the US has been withholding sensitive technology from the UK to the extent that even though we are development partners in the Joint Strike Fighter project, it is currently refusing to release the source codes for the avionics systems. More recently, Congress refused to authorise a "waiver" from the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which would have facilitated the flow of technology to the UK. Then, within the last day or so, a senior US general warned that if the EU lifted its arms embargo on China, technology transfers would all but dry up.

On the other side, within the last week, the UK government has decided to award the contract for its fleet of support vehicles to a German manufacturer, in preference to a choice of two US-led consortiums. The significance of this is that the trucks come equipped with an electronic logistics network, which will subsequently have to mesh with the combat network that will drive FRES. Already, therefore, the UK is making decisions which drive it towards further European co-operation. With the US progressively withholding access to its technology, the technological divide is growing between European and US interests, as each develop their own rival systems.

The situation is thus rapidly coming to a head. If the UK continues down the line of closer co-operation closer with its EU partners, it will also risk complete exclusion from US technology. And with the growing complexity of systems, and the complete strategic and tactical reliance on them, the day will come when forces equipped with European-manufactured equipment will be unable to communicate, much less "network" with US equipment. Forces from the different nations will, therefore, be unable to operate alongside each other in a high threat environment, which means that the Iraqi situation, where British and US forces are fighting together, could no longer be repeated.

Thus, we are in a strange situation. Technology is now driving the politics, conditioning and constraining political choices, and dictating whether or not we can form military alliances. As we move further towards technological co-operation with our EU partners, and if the US continues to withhold its technology, the divide will grow to the point where the special relationship will end. At the moment, the situation is possibly recoverable - but not for much longer. Choices must be made and Britain can no longer fulfil its traditional – or assumed – role of providing a bridge between Europe and America. It is going to have to choose between the two.

German Green politicians, bottle makers and drinks producers (both soft and not so soft, like the ubiquitous German beer) are trying to minimize waste, which is good for the environment, which is good for the planet. Right?

Wrong, says the European Commission. They are simply trying to undermine the single market and protect their producers. On the recommendation of the outgoing Internal Market Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, the Commission is taking Germany to the ECJ. Incidentally, the incoming Commission will be continuing the case, whether it likes it or not. So much (yet again) for that new broom we keep hearing about.

The problem is that the law, introduced in January 2003, and reaffirmed on Friday by the Upper House of the German Parliament, requires a mandatory deposit of 25 eurocents for every non-refillable bottle and can of beer, mineral water and carbonated drink. Until then, although 75 per cent of beverages sold in Germany had to be in reusable containers there was no mandatory deposit. It is the latest addition to the extraordinarily expensive packaging regulation that has propelled the Commission into action.

Foreign companies are complaining that these recycling laws are losing them sales, particularly as in France, a country less interested in saving the planet, it is illegal to bottle water in reusable containers. Most companies would find it prohibitively expensive to do anything but market all drinks across the EU in disposable packaging.

Far it be from us to cast doubt on the good intentions of the environment-conscious German politicians but it is worth pointing out that an astonishing proportion of legislation and regulation, introduced supposedly to save the planet and improve the quality of life, as defined by the regulators, seem to result in protection for certain favoured industry.

According to the Telegraph today, North Sea cod stocks are now so low that they "may never recover". That is the view of Dr Euan Dunn, a fisheries expert working for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who has told The Daily Telegraph that: "I'm not sure that cod will recover, even with no fishing."

His view is based on the annual, official assessment of stocks produced by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), in Copenhagen. This is to be presented to the EU on Friday, and claims there has been no recovery of stocks, the fault being the politicians who "chose to ignore scientists' calls for a ban for the past two years."

The report also claims that a "substantial" amount of cod is caught illegally, even at a time when the stocks are in danger of collapse. European Union "experts" are now calling for a total ban on cod fishing in the North Sea, Irish Sea and west of Scotland.

But, as always, with these issues, nothing is ever quite what is seems. David Griffith, the general secretary of ICES, says: "There is still no clear sign that cod stocks in the North Sea, Irish Sea and west of Scotland are making a recovery", but he adds that, "A further problem that scientists face is substantial under-reporting of catches of cod, which makes it difficult to get a true picture of the state of these stocks."

Therein lies the central problem. Because of this "under-reporting" and the fact that over-quota cod are discarded, without any record being kept, no reliable data of fish stock can actually be obtained. Thus, increasingly, the Commission is relying on results from survey vessels which are totally unreliable.

In the North Sea cod fishery, the information comes from test trawls are made by DEFRA commissioned survey vessels, as part of the International Bottom Trawl Survey (IBTS) series. These are conducted in the spring and autumn, when standardised gear is shot in specific locations, at the same time each year, and trawling is carried out at a standard speed for one half hour. The catch is then measured, and compared year-on-year to determine changes in stocks.

The process has been compared with flying in a hot-air balloon, high over a land completely hidden by a thick layer of cloud, with the occupants seeking to determine what lives on the land, how many of each species there are, how they reproduce, and how the populations might change in the future – all with a basket and a long rope. The surveyors are asked to scrape the basket along the ground for half-an-hour or so, haul it up, and have a look at the contents, from which they are asked to "guesstimate" the population, a process which they then repeat at the same time the following year.

In fact, the problems are even greater than this analogy would indicate. Technically, the result is known as the "catch per unit effort" (CPUE), but it is well known that CPUE can vary over time and can be skewed by uncontrollable variables, giving different yields even when fish stocks are constant.

It may even indicate a decline in fish stocks that are actually increasing, or an increase where they are declining. Some US authorities, therefore, do not consider this to be the most appropriate index, but it is nevertheless being increasingly relied upon by the Commission, on which to base important policy decisions.

Not least of the problems is the choice of gear. In the interests of standardisation, the trawl net used is that designed specifically by the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER) for carrying out fish surveys. It is called a Grande Overture Verticale trawl (GOV trawl), which replaced the Scottish-designed "Granton" trawl previously used.

Described by fishermen as a "semi-pelagic" trawl, this gear does not always make firm bottom contact, espeically when rigged by DEFRA surveyors. However, North Sea cod are bottom feeders and are known to adopt the escape strategy of diving for the bottom, under such nets. Therefore, they are not always caught by this type of gear, and test trawls using it will consistently underestimate the number of cod in this fishery.

Elsewhere, with different food sources, cod may become mid-water feeders and the gear will be more suitable. In other waters, it appears, cod adopt different escape strategies. Thus, as gear designers and fabricators will readily attest, there can be no such thing as a standard gear. Different nets – and techniques – must be adopted in different fisheries, even to catch the same species. Yet the scientists insist on using their standardised gear.

If this was not bad enough, since the survey technique demands that the same area is trawled each year, it can in no way represents either the actual practice of commercial fishing, or the nature of fish distribution. Extending the ‘balloon’ analogy, it is as if the surveyors are trawling a fixed area of a vast prairie in an attempt to estimate the population of a roaming herd of bison.

Fishermen readily report that fish constantly move around – to the extent that one area which has produced fish will not necessarily produce fish again. The whole nature of commercial fishing is that the fishermen still have to hunt for the fish and even trawlers working side-by-side have been known to produce very different catch levels.

Even then, it gets worse. The survey areas were determined many decades ago and are still used, but since they were established, oil production in the North Sea has become a major industry. Many fishermen point out that the industry has transformed the fishery, not least because of the 6,000 k of undersea oil pipelines which criss-cross the area. Their warmth promotes a highly localised increase in food supply, to which the fish gravitate, often deserting less fertile areas. Fishermen have thus taken to trawling along pipeline routes, but the very existence of the pipelines is ignored by the surveyors, who trawl away from these areas.

Other variables include the weather, with higher catches being reported in the turbid water after a storm. Wind direction in certain fisheries will have a considerable impact on the ease with which fish are caught, as will the tide state. Yet another variable is towing speed. Paired trawlers, able to maintain higher towing speeds, catch considerably higher proportions of larger, faster swimming fish than some of the slower, single trawlers. None of these factors are taken into account by DEFRA surveyors.

The situation thus exists where neither the fisheries-dependent data nor the fisheries independent data can give accurate information as to the fish stocks. Nor indeed can the combination of data help. One inadequate measure applied to a general model of fish stocks can result in poor performance of the whole model.

In other words, not only has the commission has no reliable data on which to base determinations of stocks, such data can wildly underestimate fish stocks in the fisheries monitored, or just as equally overstate the numbers of fish available for exploitation.

Nevertheless, the fiction is being maintained that the fisheries in the waters of EU member states are being properly managed on the basis of "scientific" information. Thus, according to The Telegraph, a spokesman for DEFRA said: "The EU will consider this advice in its scientific, technological and economic committee over the next two weeks and then prepare proposals for next year's total allowable catches."

The one thing that can be guaranteed from this is that they will get it wrong. For an analysis of what should be done, click here.

Identify the source of the following:

"The first and perhaps most fundamental defect of the statutory system is simply that there is too much law… the sheer mass of law, far from advancing the cause of safety and health, may have reached the point where it becomes counter-productive"

The second main defect is that there is not only too much law, but too much of the existing law in intrinsically unsatisfactory. The legislation is badly structured, and the attempt to cover contingency after contingency has resulted in a degree of elaboration, detail and complexity that deters even the most determined reader. It is written in a language and style that renders it largely unintelligible to those whose actions it is intended to influence".

It seems that there were several disagreements in Florence over matters to do with security, if you consider building refugee camps in Libya security. Astonishingly, France and Spain (the new Euro-duet) were the ones to oppose the construction of camps for would-be immigrants outside the EU. (As Ukraine made it clear that it wanted nothing of this plan and as Austria is not part of the G5, it was only the North African camps that were discussed.)

Germany and Italy, the movers of the plan, do not seem to be too happy about the fact that it has been sunk like some boat full of refugees off the coast of Italy. Britain, though taking the German-Italian side, seems to be a little less peeved.

Then there was the question of a new chief for Europol. That, too, has run into the sands but not because of some principled stand against something or other. As ever, the matter hinged on politics. Germany wanted to renew the founding director, Jürgen Storbeck’s mandate. The French, mindful of the constitutional rule that says every organization must have as its second chief a Frenchman, wanted to appoint a top flic, Jacques Franquet. So that ended in a stalemate as well.

However, there was one agreement and that is on digital fingerprints and photographs being introduced in 2006 to make EU passports more secure. The idea that digital photographs can make anything secure is slightly absurd, but they had to have an agreement about something.

What’s the betting the whole fiasco will be presented as a huge victory for Britain by the British minister reporting to Parliament, while it is clear from all accounts that the main falling out was between France and Germany? And isn’t it odd that while MEPs fulminate about the Italian Commissioner’s opinions on homosexuals and the position of women, they do not seem to care very much about his fervent support for refugee camps in Libya?

As the EU continues to consider whether to lift the arms embargo on China, the US is warning that military technology transfers to Europe could grind to a halt if the arms sales from EU member states do go ahead.

The warning comes from Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kohler, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, who said the U.S. government would increase scrutiny of requests to transfer to Europe technology with military applications if Brussels endorses military hardware sales to Beijing.

"This is a major concern within the U.S. government," Kohler said. "The Chinese are spending a huge amount of money on military development. Without a doubt, they have the largest, most capable military in the region. The thought of making a political gesture to China by the EU by lifting sanctions, in our view, just opens the door for trade [of] potential technology that would be extremely detrimental to our friends and allies in the region and particularly detrimental to the United States."

The lifting of the EU ban "would cause great hesitation within the government and particularly within Congress," Kohler added. "It would probably cause us to scrutinize more — rather than less — the technology transfers."

We return to the Tillack case, which we have covered not once, but twice already. (Um, three times.) However, it is not about to go away. Hans Martin Tillack, a journalist with the Stern magazine, was not known for particularly sceptical views about the European Union. This may have changed as a result of the treatment he has received and continues to receive. Or it may not.

Whatever his political views, he is clearly a good journalist and he wrote a series of extremely hard hitting pieces about EU fraud and the shenanigans within its institutions. It was clear that much of his information came from inside sources, in particular, probably from OLAF, the Commission’s fraud-busting organization that has had a somewhat chequered reputation itself.

Tillack’s flat and office were raided by the Belgian police in March, his documents and computer confiscated and he himself kept incommunicado for ten hours. His crime, allegedly, was the bribing of an official inside OLAF. This charge was quickly dropped but his papers stayed confiscated and it became obvious that the police raid had been carried out at the behest of OLAF, which is keen to identify Mr Tillack’s sources.

Backed by his publisher and the International Federation of Journalists, Mr Tillack filed a lawsuit at the European Court, his intention being to block the Commission’s access to his documents, still with the Belgian police. If OLAF or the Commission managed to get hold of them, Mr Tillack argued, his sources would be compromised.

A journalist’s right not reveal his (or her, for that matter) sources has been acknowledged, however grudgingly, by all the governments in the free world and has been upheld by the European Court of Human Rights. This is not an EU court but of the Council of Europe. Nevertheless, it is supposed to provide guidance to civic and human rights throughout Europe.

Let us also remember that the EU prides itself on its supposed historical heritage of freedom, democracy and human rights. Despite that, the ECHR has had to rule in the past against the EU courts in defence of press freedom and the need to protect journalistit sources.

The EU Court of First Instances has ruled against Tillack, deciding that the case was strictly Belgian matter, despite clear evidence that the Commission had organized the raid, his arrest and the confiscation of papers. The Commission will, presumably, now allowed to sift through the documents and deal with the possible sources as it sees fit.

This is not quite the situation in, for instance, Russia, where Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe has complained about the constant harassment meted out to its journalists and the highly regarded Valentina Politkovskaya was poisoned on her way to cover the Beslan siege. Nevertheless, such a cavalier disregard of the essentials of press freedom ought to worry some people. Strangely, there has been hardly any coverage in the British media. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been following the story and wrote about it today in the Daily Telegraph; over the week-end there was a piece on EUObserver; today the Sydney Morning Herald picked up the story. One assumes Stern will write about it in due course. What of the others?

In and amongst the flurry of press today, not least the superb piece by Ambrose Evans Pritchard on the Tillack affair (which my colleague will be reviewing, when day job permits), is an intriguing piece in the Financial Times headed "Brussels power grab ahead of EU treaty".

This admirably confirms our earlier observations, in stating that "The European Union's new constitution is not yet ratified, but moves are under way in Brussels to anticipate some of its key measures, regardless of whether it ever comes into force."

What has caught the FT’s attention is MEPs, who gain new powers under the constitutional treaty. Yet, despite the constitution still not having been ratified, they are pressing for some of that extra influence now. Political leaders in the European parliament are drawing up a list of reforms they would like to implement immediately, reflecting "the spirit" of the constitution.

They plan to ask European leaders to consult them fully in two areas where they currently have no formal role: reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy, and legislation in justice and home affairs. The treaty would give them a legislative say in both areas, but European parliament officials say MEPs should at least be consulted on them before ratification.

"The parliament will propose making progress in areas where we don't prejudge the ratification of the treaty, but where it seems sensible to take steps forward in the spirit of the constitution," said one parliamentary official, cited by the FT.

At least Andrew Duff, a Lib-Dim member of the parliament's constitutional affairs committee, had enough sense of shame to admit to the FT that: "I think it could look terribly bad if we tried to pick à la carte from the treaty those bits we especially like." Nevertheless, he said the parliament should press the Council of Ministers to pre-empt the treaty by implementing the section which says they should decide new laws in public.

The FT also notes that the European parliament is not alone in its impatience to carry out "reforms" now. Eurozone finance ministers have pre-empted the treaty by appointing Mr Juncker as their semi-permanent president - dubbed "Mr Euro" - a job foreseen in the treaty. An embryonic EU diplomatic service is also being prepared for the time when, or if, a new EU foreign minister is created by the treaty.

But, as this Blog has pointed out, there are many other areas where the commission is pre-empting the constitution. This makes a nonsense of Prodi’s claims in the Sunday Times yesterday that "further integration is off the agenda". In fact, it makes a liar of him. Integration is not off the agenda. It is proceeding apace, constitution or no, and the sooner people wake up to that fact the better.

This morning, The Daily Telegraph carries our story on the slaughter of juvenile plaice in the Irish Sea by Fleetwood fishermen. They have been forced by EU law to use 80mm net mesh instead of the preferred 110mm – which lets the juvenile fish escape – on pain of having their fishing days cut back to the point where they are driven out of business.

For a more detailed, first-hand account of the slaughter, click here.

According to Zaman online, the Turkish daily, the EU has already worked out how it is going to exclude Turkey from membership of the EU, without ever having to reject it outright – thus avoiding a potentially crippling crisis.

The "spiller of beans" is Gokhan Gunaydin, president of the Turkish Agriculture Engineers Society, who says that the secret weapon is agriculture.

In the way of accession negotiations, each of the separate EU policies is treated as a "file", dealt with sequentially, so that one file must be closed before another can be opened, thus allowing negotiations to progress.

Faced with a potential funding commitment of £18.4 billion a year to support Turkish farmers – more than half the current CAP cost - Gunaydin says the EU will simply never close the agricultural file.

The negotiators will show that Turkey simply cannot obey the complex rules of the acquis communautaire, using that as an excuse to hold up talks. Eventually, Turkey may then be offered "special status" instead of full membership."

From the scale of the problem, one can see why. The EU, as it stands, has 13 million farms, but Turkey has 3 million, and the Union wants the Turkish labour force cut from 25 to 10 percent of the population.

In order to do this, Turkey will have to find new work for at least five million people currently working in the agricultural industry, something which, in its current state of development, it would find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Pity those poor MEPs. They have acquired more work with the accession of the new countries. According to the French Green representative, Gérard Onesta, he now has to follow 20 committees instead of 17 and he has only three full-time staff to do so. Speaking as someone who has never managed to find any information whatsoever about committees from a single MEP, no matter of what political persuasion, I am delighted to hear that M Onesta takes his job so seriously.

The trouble is that he thinks, together with many others, notably the Parliament’s bureau, which consists of the President Josep Borrell, who won the election under somewhat dubious circumstances and his 14 vice-presidents, that MEPs should have higher allowances. The suggestion is that their secretarial allowance be increased by €200 a month from €12,500 to €14,500. This will be on top of all their other allowances for office staff, travel, attendance of conferences and so on.

Curiously enough, there is no proposal that, as allowances increase, there should be a greater transparency in the way these are spent. As the European Voice says:

“Following a partial reform aimed at stopping abuse, MEPs must now produce contracts of employment for their assistants and tax certificates proving they are paying them the agreed salary. But the standard contract provided by the Parliament does not stipulate how many hours a week staff are supposed to work.”

Following the nomination of the German company MAN Nutzfahzeuge, of Munich, as the preferred bidder for the £1.8 billion contract to supply trucks to the British Army, more has emerged to suggest that politics are driving the selection.

Unusually, one of the unsuccessful bidders has come out into open and condemned the selection. This is the US giant, the Oshkosh Truck Company, based in Wisconsin, with a British subsidiary in Llantrisant, Wales, and other British industrial partners.

This company already supplies wheeled tankers and tank transporters to the British Army, and is premier supplier of heavy tactical trucks to the US Army and Marines, with unrivalled combat experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia. In these theatres, in the words of Oshkosh chairman, Robert G. Bohn, they "have proven to provide awesome off-road mobility, reliability and overall performance".

Where, traditionally, rival, losing bidders keep quiet for fear of losing further work, Bohn issued a robust statement, saying, "We submitted a superior proposal in terms of vehicle performance, value for money, whole-life support and more than 90 percent UK industrial participation." He is to hold a further press conference on 28 October, when further fireworks are expected.

It has also emerged that one of the consortium partners to Stewart & Stevenson of Houston, another of the losing bidders, is the firm Multidrive of Thirsk, specialist in off-road industrial vehicles. So highly regarded is this company for technical innovation that it has been awarded a contract to develop the Future Cargo Vehicle (FCV) for the US Army.

Rather than technical excellence or even value for money, therefore, it appears that the winning German company had an ace up its sleeve. Some of its the truck parts will be manufactured in a plant in Vienna and Austrian government has offered to allow a 100 percent offset value on a deal to buy to Eurofighter for the Austrian Air Force. This has attracted heavyweight friends with one industry source claiming that Schröder had intervened at one point to lobby Blair on behalf of MAN.

Altogether, therefore, it seems as if the British Army is to be provided with second-rate equipment chosen, in part to rescue the troubled Eurofighter project, at a cost that does no favours to the British taxpayer. And, as we have observed before, despite the political implications, not a squeak of protest from the mainstream media.

Don’t panic, the EU superstate is dead. That is the message journalist Jasper Gerard, offers, based on an interview of Mr Prodi, conveyed by the Sunday Times today.

But the grounds on which Gerard bases his soothing nostrum is somewhat slender: "Those who fear the new European empire is growing too powerful should visit the palace of its king", he writes. "…if rival monarchs quaked before the magnificence of Versailles, the emperor of the European Union’s drab Brussels office block is more likely to elicit sniggers. It would not look out of place on a Slough trading estate."

Prodi, it appears, "is not mimicking Oval Office grandeur: his study is piled with inevitable EU reports; only a daubing of a giant cherub, borrowed from a real palazzo, suggests the user of this work station is more than a small-town functionary." And, according to Gerard, his pronouncements "will be strangely comforting to even the most Europhobic."

"Iraq has set off a war of words in European chancelleries between Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac et al that is deeply ‘personal’, souring all EU business; further integration is off the agenda, with a common foreign or defence policy unlikely for half a century; while Europe’s much trumpeted ambition to become the world’s most dynamic economy within a decade is a pipe dream unless we liberalise and invest".

Yes folks, the EU superstate is dead, and there is no prospect of the Franco-German engine chugging us inexorably to "federal Europe": it has long since conked out. "With the EU growing larger, the weight of the two countries decreases. But even with a union of 15 (before its recent expansion to 25 states) it became hard to say there was a dominating Franco-German engine," Prodi says. "It heaved hardest for its ‘national interests rather than integration’".

Er… so that’s all right then. The "superstate" and "federal Europe" is dead. We were dreaming about the constitution, due to be signed at the end of this month; we were having nightmares when we read the green paper on defence procurement; we imagined the establishment of the agencies – not least the Fisheries Control Agency; the developments in the field of justice and home affairs, and the European police college, are all fantasy.

The insidious creep of tax harmonisation hasn’t happened; the European space programme, the Single European Sky and the European Research Area, to say nothing of the commission’s encroachments into road safety policy, dictating the traffic laws for the whole of the EU, are simply figments of our imagination.

But Prodi mentions nothing of these, and I detect a trend here. With the constitution looming over us, the rush is on for reassurance… nothing to fear, people – the EU might have had ambitions for a superstate once, but that’s all over now… that’s in the past. It’s all sweetness and light, economic liberalisation and all that.

Does Prodi foresee Europe becoming a superpower rivalling the US? "In 50 years you can dream of anything, but you need decades for a united foreign policy and even longer for military policy… Only fear of a common European danger will change that." Writes Gerard, "Osama is perhaps Europe’s best hope for union: yikes".

Yikes indeed. In 1957, after the Suez crisis had proved to be the catalyst that drove the parties together to agree the Treaty of Rome, a colleague of Monnet remarked to him, only half in jest, that a statue should be erected to Nasser, as "the federator of Europe". Osama is fulfilling exactly the same role, and Prodi knows it. He and his successors will continue to exploit and expand the "fear of a common European danger". If you have a common danger, that justifies a common policy.

That was the most interesting part of the article, and Gerard uses it as a throw-away line. What it does show though is that, while the headline says one thing, the reality is wholly different. The integration ethos is still as powerful as ever it was. The great deception continues - and that truly is the "common European danger".

While various nominees for Barroso’s Commission have been experiencing problems with the European Parliament (not that it can do anything very much apart from expressing disapproval of such outrageous things as Christian morality) the one who was supposed to be the real free-marketeer and Atlanticist has sailed through with flying colours.

Peter Mandelson, an astute politician and a staunch Blairite, whatever that may mean at any given time, gave all the right answers and pressed all the right buttons. No, he would never go against any existing EU policy (not that he could, as these policies together with the budget are laid down for years ahead) and no, of course, he will not bring any new ideas to his position. Yes, of course, he believes in free trade but only as defined by the EU, which is usually somewhat Orwellian in the true sense of the word, that is meaning the exact opposite of what it says. (Remember Ministry of Truth, whose job it was to produce complete lies day after day?)

Mr Mandelson is, as we know, very smart when it comes to politics, though, perhaps less so in private financial matters. He has always managed to present different faces to different people. (And, let it be said in patenthesis, proved himself to be a very skilful Northern Ireland Secretary.) It would not have taken him long to work out that the European Parliament and its so-called tough grilling of candidates is of little significance. On the other hand, why antagonize them unnecessarily? None of this proves that he is a free-marketeer or a true Atlanticist, merely that he is a Blairite.

His comments on the Iraqi war during a jamboree of centre-left politicians in Budapest prove the same point. Mr Mandelson suggested that the UN should have supported the war in Iraq; had it and the various members of the Security Council done so, much of the present instability in that country would have been avoided.

The second part of that statement is the sort of feel-good comment that is easy to make and impossible either to prove or disprove. There is absolutely no reason to suggest that the neo-Baathists and power-hungry extremist Shia clerics would have behaved any differently had that “second” UN resolution been passed. What makes anyone think that these people do not view the UN as another evil tool of decadent western imperialism?

Or perhaps Mr Mandelson meant that there would have been more international troops in Iraq to deal with the insurgency. Given the NATO and, specifically French and German shenanigans over the much needed troops in Afghanistan this, too, is questionable. Who else would have gone in and what would they have done?

The statement does, however, illustrate the obsession with the UN that European politicians and media seem to have. Mr Mandelson’s comments were analyzed in various ways to see whether he really meant that Britain should not have joined an undertaking that had not been blessed by the UN (having joined various others, such as the sorting out of the Balkans). He was very careful not to say so, merely to stroke the back of the pro-UN transnationalists, many of whom stop being transnationalists or internationalists once their own real or perceived interests are at stake. See France, Russia and China passim.

On the other hand Mr Mandelson’s statement could have implied a criticism of the UN, whose track record at sorting out tricky problems and standing up to aggressive dictators is distinctly patchy, and of those members of the Security Council who furiously opposed the war for their own private, less than admirable reasons.

Which brings me to the food for oil scandal, unsurprisingly not referred to by Mr Mandelson. The French media, as we know, is refusing to write about it, on the slender grounds that it is not news (what is, one wonders, in their opinion) and the outrageous fact that apparent French participants have been named while American ones cannot be until everything has been investigated.

I imagine some American participants have been named on the odd blog but, in any case, what is to prevent the French authorities investigating the various claims or the “accused” defending themselves? Of course, at least one of them, Charles Pasqua is under investigation in France for sundry other peccadillos, which makes him rather busy.

The British media has covered the scandal for one day, then decided that it was less important than the latest football story. Other media outlets have been more bemused. In a thoughtful leader on Friday the International Herald Tribune maintained that, despite the gradually emerging details of the enormous scam,

“[t]he now-maligned program not only saved the lives of countless Iraqis, but it also kept the sanctions alive politically for years, right until the invasion.”

“… that the UN is fatally hobbled by corruption or incompetence.”

“Members of the United Nations seem to have been deeply involved in the scandal. For example, Benon Sevan, once the executive director of Oil-for-Food, was included on an Iraqi Oil Ministry listing of hundreds of people who allegedly received oil vouchers as bribes from Saddam's regime. ...As such details have dribbled out, the U.N. has reacted predictably - by trying to sweep Oil-for-Food under the rug or change the subject. For example, the U.N.'s commission of
inquiry, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, has been at work for almost six months. But it doesn't seem to be making progress.”

In his column today, Booker leads with a story on the wind turbine battle… and it’s getting personal. He is chairman of a group that opposes the plan for the first giant turbine to surmount the 1,000-foot-high escarpment of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. This is not so much "nimby" as "niaby" – not in anyone’s back yard.

His "two" is headed "The end of the 60-year affair" which picks up on the story of the £1.8 bn contract for British Army trucks being awarded to a German firm, MAN-Nutzfarzheuge, a story which we ran last week on the Blog.

Booker also deals with the implications for the US special relationship, which we also rehearsed in the Blog, but it is interesting to note that, while he included in his copy a link to EU Referendum so that readers could find out more if they wished, this was not included in the printed copy or on the online version. Can't have informed readers can we?

In fact, it really is quite extraordinary that Booker alone should see the merits of the story, and include it in his column, crammed into a few tightly-written paragraphs, while the rest of the paper fritters away its space on such vital subjects as the account of women downloading from the website on Ken Bigley’s execution, the tale of two women who are about to canoe down the river Niger, how the sound volume of new films threatens the hearing of younger cinema-goers, and coffee made from civet cat shit.

All of these get full-page treatment, which rather confirms my colleague’s thesis in her Blog this morning, about the decline of the media. If sales of newspapers are declining, this is unsurprising, given the low-grade trivia to which they now devote their efforts.

For his third story, Booker deals with the quite remarkable episodes in the North East, where ministers are quite openly breaking the law, in promoting the regional assemblies – something you would think the media might report elsewhere if we still had grown-up newspapers – and then he retails the Fishing News story about the Whitby trawlers refused entry to the port to escape a storm.

In many ways, the Booker column is a newspaper within a newspaper. Many readers tell us that they only buy the Sunday Telegraph because of his column, and you will see stories there which many months later get front-page treatment in other papers. But it is a poor reflection of the media in general that so many of the stories you do read in Booker are only ever reported by him.

Thus does civilisation decline, not with a bang, but a whimper. As the world goes to hell in a handcart, we are fed a diet of stories about civet cat shit. Correction: delete "civet cat".

The complaining from the mainstream media about the way it is being treated by its customers (abandoned to an ever greater extent) is continuing. We have seen various efforts at special pleading from the American newspapers and networks.

A New York Times article, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune by Frank Rich, speaks of a situation in which the media is under attack from the administration as never before. Actually, they seem to be getting away with saying rather a large number of things that oppose the administration, which is as it should be, but is hardly a sign of rampant censorship.

Nor am I greatly impressed by the suggestion that somehow the American media is not allowed to report the Iraqi “quagmire”. To a reasonably careful reader of newspapers it would appear that nothing else is reported from that country. It is interesting that this sobbing should appear just as another well-documented report is published by the American Enterprise Institute of a left-wing/pro-Democrat bias in the established media.

So, there we are: readers and viewers are looking elsewhere and the President does not think it worth his while to give too many press conferences. Not quite in the same category as journalists being arrested and murdered in Russia or Belarus or many, many other countries but it all adds to the grievances.

The same edition of the International Herald Tribune carries a similar sob story from France, where the main newspapers seem to have gone into terminal decline. Written by Catherine Field, a journalist based in Paris and, therefore, not perhaps a completely unbiased observer, the article starts on a trenchant note:

“Those who care about democracy and public awareness in France can only wring their hands as they watch the country’s national newspapers wither away. In a country of 60 million, there are just four national news dailies of any significance – Le Figaro, Le Monde, Libération and Le Parisien, a tabloid also sold in the provinces as Aujourd’hui en France.”

“… the cost of printing and distribution, an area where conservative union barons and cosseted workers have long held sway. The unions press demands on pay and rostering that drive up prices, enforce early deadlines – making for stale news – and often arbitrarily throw the switch to keep an issue off the streets.”

“The modern media, especially in the Anglophone democracies, are more pwoerful than any other institution, apart from the state, and they have increasingly seen it as their duty to challenge the state and its governing party with all the force they can muster. Like the mediaeval churchmen, they see that the media church has blemishes, faults, even sins, but it must as a whole be protected for it is Good – that is Good for Democracy. It is good because it is independent, questioning and open. Anything that goes beyond a bit of jocular ribbing is out: worse, it betrays the faith.”

“...there is a good argument that he [Buerk] is the most important journalist of the post-war period – as his pieces on the Ehtipian famine in 1984, themselves the result of dogged, sensitive and yet detached reporting, opened the floodgate of charitable giving and may have changed the way people and politicians viewed Africa.”

Some of the Eurosceptic community, to say nothing of the Guardian and the BBC, are getting terribly excited about an e-mail sent by John Redwood, claiming that it suggests the Tories will unilaterally withdraw Britain from its European Union agreements such as fisheries and agriculture, if it is unable to negotiate an agreed exit with its EU partners.

Writes the Guardian: "The shadow cabinet member for deregulation said this in an email to members of Ukip; on the surface it suggests he is willing to see a Tory government tear up its EU treaty obligations".

Redwood actually confined his comments to fishing, writing: "We will expect to win them [the powers] back by renegotiation. But if they refuse, we will amend the 1972 European Communities Act to take them back unilaterally. Easy isn't it?"

This is actually no more or less that Michael Howard stated on 10 June in a letter to the then shadow secretary of state for agriculture and fisheries, but many Labourites and commentators have taken it to be something new.

For instance, Alan Milburn, Labour's election coordinator, said the email was a further sign of how far Michael Howard was taking his party to the right and Denis MacShane, the Europe minister, claimed that the e-mail represented "a fundamental crossing of the line that separates legitimate criticism of EU policies to the unilateral policy of being willing to breach the EU treaties and quit the EU."

Sir Stephen Wall, a former British ambassador to the EU, also challenged Mr Redwood's approach, saying "civil servants are under obligation not to carry out any act that would be illegal. "

"And we could find ourselves before the European court facing very swingeing fines", he says. "I think it would be the first time that a British government had effectively torn up a treaty - that's normally something which dictatorships do, not normally something which democracies do."

In an attempt to clarify the scenario postulated by Wall, Jon Humphrys today interviewed Graham Brady MP, Conservative shadow minister for foreign affairs, on the Today programme, together with MacShane. The transcript is posted below, and I leave it to our readers to decide whether Brady succeeded.

John Humphrys: One of the big promises made by the Conservatives is that if they form the next government, they will pull out of the European Union fisheries treaty. Most people agree that the treaty has been bad for this country and our fishing fleet. But pulling out of it – that’s another thing. Could we do so without having ultimately… (break in recording)
Graham Brady: (recording resumes) …we believe very strongly that we can do it through renegotiation. The fisheries policy hasn’t just been bad for Britain; it’s been bad for fish stocks and it’s been bad for a number of other member states as well. And we believe we can achieve it through renegotiation but if necessary, and this is a crucial difference between the next Conservative government and the present Labour government, if necessary we will stand up for Britain’s interests; we will resort to domestic legislation and we will do it by that means if we have to.
JH: The effect of that could be that we leave the European Union
GB: We that’s not true and I think that er…
JH: Why not? If we unilaterally break a treaty, however we do it, you can… er use the language of politics – we will er… introduce new legislation, but what we would be doing would unilaterally, we’d be unilaterally leaving a treaty, abrogating a treaty to which we had signed up - and that would be tantamount to…
GB: (illegible) …a few years ago over the ban on British beef and that didn’t mean that France was going to leave the European Union.
JH: It wasn’t a treaty obligation!
GB: Well, they were clearly in breach of their treaty obligations
JH: Ah, but there’s all the difference isn’t there between saying that we will no longer have anything to do with this treaty, we will in effect leave this treaty, we will break it…
GB: We’re saying that we’d amend the treaty… and I think we..
JH: Well, what if they won’t let us amend it?
GB: Well, they will. And interestingly, if you look at some of the comments quoted yesterday in The Times, Monsieur Bayrou, the leaders of the UDF, a very pro-European centrist party in France, who was quoted as saying the EU cannot survive without Britain, which is much admired everywhere. We must find a way of keeping Britain inside and not resort to other ways forward. What we underestimate, what particularly this government underestimates, is how significant Britain is to the EU, how much they need to have us in the EU, and that’s why they constantly fail to negotiate as hard for Britain as they can, constantly fail to get as good a deal as they should, and that’s why we believe we could do so much better.
JH: All right. But ultimately, ultimately, if it comes to it, and it could – you acknowledge that it could; you think it’s unlikely but you acknowledge that it could – if it comes to it and the other countries, or some other countries say look, Britain simply cannot do this, we will not have it. Then what do you say? Do you say, OK, we’ll leave?
GB: No. I think what you have to realise that this will be in the context of a large
renegotiation of all of the treaties in any case…
JH: But you’re still not answering the question though, are you?
GB: Well… the question will be a very different question. Er.. the situation following, I hope, a Conservative victory in the next general election; following a "no" vote by at least this country and hopefully a number of other countries on the constitution will be a renegotiation of all the treaties in any case.
JH: I know, but if the negotiations don’t go the way you want them to, and you are faced finally with this critical decision – they won’t let us amend the treaty in the way we want to - would you in the final analysis say all right then, we’ll leave the club?
GB: No, we wouldn’t. Michael Howard has been very clear. We don’t intend to leave the EU. We don’t think it is necessary; we don’t think it’s appropriate or in Britain’s interests. What we do believe is that we can get a much better deal.
JH: OK…
GB: We can only get that better deal if we’re prepared to be firm, if we’re prepared to be very clear; if we’re prepared to fight our corner in the way that this government simply does not.
JH: Ah, but you’ve given away your final card, haven’t you. You know. You’ve actually said that we’ll make a big fuss, but in the end, its not…
GB: Not at all.
JH: That’s what you’ve just said..
GB: That’s the crucial distinction, that’s the crucial distinction . We said we’d use domestic legislation on this particular aspect, the Common Fisheries Policy. I think that is an indication to our colleagues in Europe how serious we are, and that we intend to succeed in renegotiation, and ultimately we will.
JH: All right let’s put that then to Denis MacShane. If they fail in the kind of renegotiation they want, could they use domestic legislation to get what they want, and if they can, why doesn’t the present government, your government do the same?
Denis MacShane: For the very same reason that John Redwood and Michael Howard didn’t do so when they were in Conservative governments; they didn’t renegotiate those policies when they were in power. Yes, I’m critical of them. But I can give you examples of other European countries who don’t like, for example, the challenge and the competition of Easyjet and Ryanair to their domestic airlines but, if they unilaterally pass legislation to stop that kind of common, single market policy then they’re without the treaty. And, I’m afraid this is music to the ears of UKIP and Paul Sykes – it’s fascinating that you’ve got this e-mail for John Redwood; I see he’s now doing an Oliver Letwin and disappearing – but Michael Howard at the party conference for the Conservatives also talked about pulling out of the social policy that gives every British citizen 28 days paid holiday a year. If you do that, you’re in breach of a treaty. John. You can’t be in the European Union, which is a treaty-based organisation and say, to quote John Redwood, we will unilaterally repudiate part of that treaty and stay in the treaty organisation.
JH: So what you’re saying, what the government is saying is there are things we profoundly do not like – for instance we don’t like the Common Agricultural Policy; we all know that, no government has for many, many years now – we don’t like in this particular case the fisheries policy. However, we value our membership of the European Union so much that, even though we don’t like it and it clearly harms Britain’s interests, we will not make a fuss about it.
DM: We make, if by fuss, you mean negotiate and play very hard ball, we are tough on that.
JH: It hasn’t worked, though, has it?
DM: No – just give me one second – we managed for example to reduce the level of the Common Agricultural Policy spending from about 70 percent of the EU budget under the Tories to getting down to close to 40 percent - not enough, I accept that. We’ve got a lot of like-minded partners but if we say to them, to quote John Redwood, we will unilaterally breach a treaty, then of course we loose all leverage and all partners in Europe. And it’s part of this problem of isolating us from Europe, because the Conservatives now are the most extreme right-wing party of any mainstream parties in Europe…
JH: All right, let’s put party politics aside for a second…
DM: OK, fine, fine
JH: …because what does puzzle people, and we had it earlier this week on this programme, what does puzzle people is what we can and cannot do within the European Union. I mean, here we have Mr Brady saying, quite clearly, look, we’ll try to renegotiate and if that fails we’ll pass domestic legislation and that’ll make it all right.. Are you saying that that simply cannot be done without ultimately having to leave the European Union.
DM: No member of the European Union can pass domestic unilateral legislation which repudiates part of a solemn treaty obligation without being in breach of the treaty…
JH: And the effect of being in breach of a European Union treaty would be…
DM: …is either you have massive fines, or you quit.
JH: Right. So there we are. That’s clear enough Mr Brady. Either we have massive fines or we have to leave the Union.
(silence)
FH: Hello Mr Brady.
GB: …it’s a very different kind of European Union.
JH: Sorry, we missed the first part of what you said there.
GB: Well, the third option that Denis MacShane refused to give is that you renegotiate, and….
JH: We’re assuming that that’s failed… we’ve moved on from that…
GB: We’re not prepared to assume we’ve failed.
JH: Yes you are prepared to assume it… (interruption) No, no, sorry, with respect, you are prepared to assume it because you’ve already given me the fallback position, which would be domestic legislation.
GB: No, no, the fallback position of using domestic legislation would be as a part of our strategy of renegotiation. It is because we are determined to succeed in our renegotiation, er, that we’ve been very clear, that if necessary on that particular point we would use domestic legislation…
JH:…in which case you would be in violation…
GB: …that would be part of our negotiations.
JH: In which case, if you did that, if you used domestic legislation, you would be in violation of the treaty.
GB: Yes, and we would then use that as part of our renegotiation.
JH: I’m sorry, you’ve lost me here. Sorry, this is terribly important – you’ve lost me here. That cannot be a part of your renegotiation because you have already, by going down the domestic legislation route, you have already abandoned the renegotiation.
GB: We have no intention of abandoning renegotiation. We intend to succeed in that
negotiation…
JH: But you’ve already accepted that the nuclear option is there…
GB: (unintelligible) …go on for a long period of time. We’re looking here, probably, a very protracted, probably, period, which we hope and intend is going to lead to a very different shape of European Union which will be far more flexible…
JH: All right.
GB: …which will have a number of different relationships, which won’t lead to the kind of constant integration, giving up more and more powers that Denis MacShane is prepared to accept. We won’t accept that and now we’ve a number of new members who don’t accept that either.
JH: Denis MacShane. A final thought to you. Isn’t that the case that we’ve too acquiescent and we are now maybe a bit out of step with the way Europe’s going.
DM: On the contrary, Europe’s coming more into step with the British Labour position. As Graham said, read the Times yesterday. I don’t want to be arrogant but actually Britain stands very tall in Europe. Graham, you’ll have to persuade the Irish, the Dutch, the Danes, the Germans, all of whom have fishing fleets, to accept your policy. They won’t. Now either you stand with John Redwood and say we will unilaterally breach the treaty, which I think, and every lawyer thinks, and every functionary, every civil servant thinks means quitting
the European Union. That’s the isolationist position. And every businessman in Britain should now really look at the way the Tories have crossed the Rubicon and are much closer to the UKIP position than defending Britain’s national interest which is to be in Europe and helping to shape for what counts for Britain.
JH: Denis MacShane, Graham Brady, thank you very much.

That, it would appear, are the arguments. Brady would have us believe we will not fail in our negotiations, so the question of implementing domestic legislation seems to be a negotiating ploy. MacShane says, quite rightly, that if we unilaterally amended the treaty, we would be subject to huge fines. Then would come the crunch point - would we pay, or would we leave? But that question is unanswered by Brady. We will negotiate... "we have no intention of abandoning renegotiation", he says.

The Daily Mail today offers a useful reflection of the past week’s events in the European Union.

In an editorial headed: "Still the rotten heart of Europe", it notes that: "We have just witnessed an almost surreal week in EU politics". "Where else", it asks, "but at the rotten heart of Europe could thieves prosper and honesty be punished, while MEPs ignore corruption and rage instead over a Commissioner who dares express his Christian beliefs".

The Mail, of course, is making the contrast between the sacking of Marta Andreasen and the European parliament objections to Rocco Buttiglione after his remarks on homosexuality, observing – as indeed have we in the Blog – that "nothing changes – nothing improves… the EU once again covers itself in disgrace.

I might have added to rider to this, by referring to its own page seven, where it reports on the latest adventures of Godfrey Bloom, who is accused of getting "hammered" (i.e., blind drunk – now there’s something unusual) in a restaurant and then attempting to grope a party of female rugby players whom he had invited to Brussels on the pretext of showing them round the parliament.

One cannot help but note the contrast with our previous Blog. While a Conservative MP, Owen Paterson, spends the night on a trawler to research the malign effect of the CFP, UKIP MEP Bloom spends the night in a fashionable – and expensive – restaurant, getting blind drunk and groping girls at the taxpayers’ expense, then to sleep it off in a four-star hotel.

We have recently been wondering what UKIP is doing – apart from having arguments about who is to be leader - not least after its silence when the government made a German firm preferential bidder for the supply of British Army trucks but at least we know what one MEP was doing.

Bloom is now attracting considerable hostility from the activists in his own region, Yorkshire and Humberside. Despite his willingness, according to the Mail, to shell out on £1500-worth of beer, champagne, steak and oysters in order to entertain the girls, he has been notoriously reluctant to spend even a bent ha’penny on helping his election team set up a regional office and a decent administrative infrastructure.

It now seems that UKIP has got something in common with "Brussels" – a rotten heart.

It was about 5.30 in the morning, perhaps ten miles off Barrow-in-Furness in the eastern part of the Irish Sea, still dark, when the haul broke the surface. In the glare of the floodlights on the stern of our vessel, the Fleetwood trawler Kiroan, the first net was hooked onto the power block – a huge hydraulic lifting arm – and skipper Philip Dell expertly pulled the bulging cod end from the water and swung it over the fish room hatch.

Philip held the bag there, suspended, so we could see thousands of tiny fish packed into the bag. Most of what we could see was small plaice, with scores of them protruding though the narrow mesh, gasping and flapping in their death throes.

An unseen hand below pulled the quick release on the end of the bag. The contents cascaded down a stainless steel chute onto the conveyor belt in the fish room, awaiting our further inspection.

We stayed on deck long enough to see the second bag plucked from the sea, its contents likewise dumped down the chute. Then I, Conservative shadow fisheries minister Owen Paterson, and the PPC for Blackpool North and Fleetwood, Gavin Williams, squeezed our way along the top deck, stepping over the still taut warp cables, and made our way down the vertical ladder to watch the crew sorting the fish.

As the first batch was sorted, we watched in mounting horror as Mate, Francois Bruneel with Steve McDaid and Gary Hugman, the enormously impressive crew, threw marketable fish into red plastic bins – not unlike laundry baskets – sweeping the rest, undersize and unmarketable fish along the belt. Lubricated by a constant flow of sea water, they were flushed through a small opening in the hull, back into the sea, dead and dying, from whence they had so recently been plucked.

That was the horror. From that first, bulging net, the harvest of the sea, we estimated that at least ninety percent of the catch was dumped – or "discarded" in the clinical jargon of the trade. By far the bulk of this waste was immature plaice, thousands of baby fish, some only three or four inches long, tiny, perfect replicas of the few remaining adult fish which would be landed later that day and sold for the dinner plates of the nation.

Then came the next batch, smaller in quantity – much smaller. Good, clean adult fish, mainly prime plaice, ripe for the market, tossed swiftly into the red bins, ready for gutting and cleaning. This time the bulk of the "discards" amounted to unsaleable "dogs" – lesser spotted dogfish. These were also flushed through the hatch. Plunging into the water, each shook itself like a canine, as if indignant at their treatment, and swum swiftly away from the trawler, none the worse for their experience.

So what was happening here? Why the obscene waste from the first batch – "next year’s harvest", one of the crew observed bitterly – and so little from the second?

As we grouped in the tiny mess room after the nets had been "shot" for the second time, supping mugs of scalding tea, Skipper Dell explained. It was the nets he was forced to use. They had been specified by the EU commission in regulations under the Common Fisheries Policy, perversely – to the utter frustration of all the fishermen of Fleetwood - as a "conservation" measure, supposedly designed to aid "cod recovery" in the Irish Sea.

If you wanted logic, Dell continued, there was none – none that he and his colleagues could discern.

His vessel, a 23 metre, twin rig trawler, built in Aberdeen in 1979, had been brought round to the west coast after years of service in the North Sea, to fish for the abundant plaice in the Irish Sea, turning to quota-free prawn fishing when the plaice had gone into hiding through the winter, or when the quota had run out.

Over the magic "10 metres" in length, his and each of the seven other like vessels in the Fleetwood fleet – down from over 40 in 1994 and over 70 in 1984 – had been given a "days at sea" allocation of 22 days a month, during which they were allowed out to earn their keep, chasing ever diminishing quotas that made it harder each year to make a living, as the diminishing number of vessels testified.

But – and here the "but" is in huge capitals – in order to fish all of those 22 days, he was required to use nets with a mesh size in the cod end of 80 mm. It was this net which had scooped up all these baby fish – the slaughter of the innocent – and caused his crew to throw them away dead, back into the sea.

Skipper Dell, and all his colleagues, much preferred to use a larger mesh size – 110 mm. It was this mesh that had been used on the second net and its efficacy had been startlingly demonstrated to us when Dell had brought up the "clean" catch, devoid of the immature juveniles. Not for nothing, the Fleetwood fishermen call the larger-mesh nets "riddlers" – they "riddle" out the smaller fish and let them escape, to grow bigger, to mature and breed, before they were caught for the table.

And therein lies insanity. Dell was allowed to use the 110 mm nets. But, if he did, the EU commission imposed a penalty on him, slashing his "days at sea" to 17 days. With the desperately marginal economics of the enterprise - the Kiroan uses a ton of diesel fuel each day, when out on the grounds - his livelihood was already at risk. The enforced cut-back would exclude him from the vital prawn fishery, drive his vessel onto the beach and his crew onto the dole. To stay in business, the only legal option Dell had was to use the smaller mesh.

Standing in front of us as we sat in that tiny mess room, bracing himself against the bulkhead to counter the pitching of the boat, Dell spoke with a passion born of frustration and sheer outrage – the outrage of a professional fisherman, thirty-five years at sea – forced to do something he knew to be wrong. "It needs stopping…", he said. "We’ve been doing this for ten months, and we’re slaughtering the fish."

It is not as if he and his colleagues had not tried to stop the slaughter. In January last, he and his colleagues had bearded fisheries minister Ben Bradshaw, when to came sweeping up from London to visit the docks. Dell had asked him to explain the policy. "He couldn’t", says Dell, but had asked his aide to jot down details of the complaint. "We never heard from him again", Dell added bitterly.

The Fleetwood fishermen did not leave it there. After constant complaining, fisheries scientists from CEFAS spent a month on board the sister vessel to Kiroan, the FV Artemis, observing the effects of the different mesh sizes. They too found that the larger mesh "dramatically reduced the bulk catch, therefore reducing discarding from 80 percent plus to less than 50 percent by volume".

That the smaller volume of "discards" comprised mainly dogfish was also noted. Crucially, the scientists’ subsequent report clearly stated that "the cod recovery plan has forced them (the fishermen) to work smaller mesh and kill (especially) smaller plaice."

But that was in May and now, nearly six months later – with perhaps millions more baby fish slaughtered - nothing has been done.

It was time for the second haul. Now bright daylight, getting on for ten in the morning, with the sea mercifully calm, Dell repeated the procedure we had seen earlier and again the fish cascaded into the fish room. Again we saw the obscene waste – the senseless slaughter of thousands of immature fish.

We saw something else, as well. A lot of the fish were very muddy. What was happening, Dell told us, was that the tiny fish blocked the mesh, choking it, so that mud and sand could not be washed clear as the net was towed. This was highly dangerous, sometimes increasing the weight of the catch to such an alarming extent that hauling it out with the power-block risked overloading the machine. Three times that season, Dell had been forced to take emergency action, slashing the nets open and dumping the entire catches, to prevent the lifting arm crashing down on his crew, working on the deck below.

"It's political", Dell said after the meagre catch had been iced and stowed away. Nine, six stone boxes of fish, including six of adult plaice, were dwarfed by the cavernous hold which had a capacity for over 400.

Dell believes that the mesh size was set at 80 mm to accommodate the fleet of huge Belgian beam trawlers, sometimes as many as 40-50 at a time, which exploit the waters. They are not after plaice, but the more valuable sole. And, with a 110 mm mesh, you cannot catch sole. They can curl themselves up to swim through the larger mesh, even fish the size of a dinner plate getting clear.

So the EU commission has given in to the Belgians. Back on the dock, Dell showed us the nets they used. Not only were they 80mm, but the twine was 6mm, grotesquely thick and so rigid that you could scarcely bend it. The mesh simply does not open up under tow, "Not even sand can get through that", Dell said, bitterness again clearly evident.

With massive, 4,000 horsepower vessels (the Kiroan, itself a powerful boat, has a mere 470 horsepower), dragging huge, 12 metre beam trawls at an amazing 6-7 knots (Dell tows at 3 knots), they hoover up everything, digging up the sand and mud to get at the precious, buried sole. We’ve followed up behind them, Dell said, and everything is dead.

The ultimate irony, in the "cod protection area", is that the Belgians have a by-catch of cod, caught accidentally as they pursue the sole, 30 times larger than the entire Fleetwood quota. And when we drew the attention for the authorities to that, says Dell, they started dumping the cod overboard, so that it is not declared. They don’t even want the fish.

We left Phil Dell and his crew on the quay, but not before he confided an important secret. Unlike other skippers, "I do not normally use 80 mm nets for plaice", he told us. "I refuse to slaughter fish – we use the 110 mm nets". The trip had been a demonstration to show us what he was supposed to do. But, under the rules, in so doing, and by having both types of net on board (he uses the 80 mm nets for prawns, where no plaice swim), he is breaking the law. He could be prosecuted and heavily fined. But he is prepared to take the risk. He cannot bring himself to slaughter fish needelessly.

My admiration for this man, and his colleagues, is unbounded, matched only by my utter contempt for these mindless officials of the EU commission who dream up such devastating rules and make honest men into criminals.

To give him his due, Owen Paterson was very angry as well. We all are. Damn these people, damn them, damn them, these smug, complacent offiicals. Like the millions of fish they cause to be sent to the bottom of the sea, to rot in a carpet of putrefying waste, may they also rot - in Hell.

Following on from my colleague’s piece about the Daily Telegraph (and aren’t we all glad that he has returned safely from the Irish Sea), it is worth pointing out that in another article on the subject of the Europol debate, Andrew Sparrow has shown that the Home Office Minister, Caroline Flint has refused to state categorically that Britain will not sign up to the five year programme at the next Summit.

She was pressed on the subject by a Tory backbencher, Nick Hawkins and by the spokesman Jonathan Djanogly, but would say stubbornly that the Tories were scaremongering and the Government did not agree with many aspects of the five year plan on the “area of freedom, justice and security”. It ought to be added that even the Labour-dominated European Scrutiny Committee is alarmed. Its chairman, Jimy Hood, said that all this talk of a single area of freedom, justice and security was

“…encouraging the notion of such an area of unitary state separate from member states. Regardless to the countless assurances from our ministers, it is not easy to be comfortable with the rhetoric from the commission throughout its proposals.”

“There is no question of the UK signing up to a harmonised European legal system and the communication does not propose one.”

Cripes!! Turn my back for one minute and the newspapers are crammed with news about "Europe" – at least both the Telegraph and Times are, which is all I have had time to look at so far.

As well as stories, both these newspapers have leaders on the EU, each different but both linked by a commons theme. In this Blog I will deal briefly with the Telegraph offering and, in another Blog, with the points raised by The Times. I will then identify the linkages and broader issues in a third Blog, once I have dealt with my recent, and appalling experiences in the Irish Sea.

As to the Telegraph, then, this newspaper heads its leader with "Europol is Watching you", commenting on its own full-page spread encompassing three stories on the justice and home affairs theme. Click here, here, and here.

The brief point I want to make here is that the Telegraph seems, at last, to have discovered Tampere and the agreements made at the European Council in 1999, on extending Brussels jurisdiction into criminal justice, policing and immigration.

Five years on, however, the paper observes, "hardly anyone in Britain is aware of what is being done." One can only respond to this with a rather sour note by saying "well whose bloody fault is that then…", noting, after all, that the Telegraph is a newspaper which has the resources to make people aware of what is happening.

Better late than never, I suppose, but it is then galling to see the paper offer "Congratulations … to David Davis, the shadow home secretary, for alerting us to the menace in Parliament yesterday." "Part of his problem", it adds, is that "the scale and ambition of the Tampere agenda can make an accurate critique sound hysterical... A corpus of EU criminal law; a European police force; an EU prosecuting magistracy; a border gendarmerie; habeas corpus under threat - these things sound so outlandish that people are disinclined to believe them."

Tell us about it!!!

Despite this, the leader and all three pieces are an essential read, but take the leader conclusion with a pinch of salt: "It is often said that the Tories spend too much time talking about Europe. But, as Tampere demonstrates, the EU now affects virtually every aspect of public life in Britain."

The problem, we on this Blog would aver, is that the Tories - and the Telegraph - spend too little time talking about "the elephant in the room", and the latter rather too much time on such things as the girlfriends of English football managers. But it is, good to see that, at last, someone is beginning to wonder about the pile of foul-smelling ordure on the carpet.

These reports are coming through in a trickle, I fear, but other matters intervene. However, since they are of fringe meetings that did not see the light of day in the mainstream media, they may still be interesting to our readers.

This one is about fish, inevitably, as the subject is, apparently, high on the Conservative Party’s agenda. But first, a little background information:

Save Britain’s Fish has existed for a long time; probably almost as long as Britain’s membership of the Common Fisheries Policy. Its activity was little known and achieved even less until it was taken over by John Ashworth, engineer and conservationist, Tom Hay, fisherman and Sheryll Murray, political activist and fisherman’s wife. Between them, with some help from various other sources, they transformed the organization into something the eurosceptic movement can be proud off.

They put together a great deal of research and winkled out all kinds of information about the genesis and development of the CFP. (Believe me, it was not easy to get hold of most of that information.)

They have also run a series of very successful meetings at party conferences, explaining to delegates how the system works (or does not work, depending on your point of view). Other meetings took place in Parliament and around the country.

The party conference fringe meetings have always been among the most popular, packed to the rafters, and not only because fish and chips are invariably served afterwards.

The meeting in Bournemouth was as successful as ever. It says something for the good name of Save Britain’s Fish that people rushed away from the conference centre as soon as Michael Howard stopped speaking (or, perhaps, even before) in order to get to the meeting, some way along the promenade.

The star of the show this year was, undoubtedly, Owen Paterson, the Conservative spokesman on farming and fisheries, as he explained in detail what, in his opinion, a putative Conservative government will do to honour its manifesto promise.

Mr Paterson was in no doubt that the fisheries policy has to be reclaimed and turned into a national one. Beyond that, he refused to be specific. Having travelled round the Britain and to other fishing countries, like the United States, Canada, Iceland, the Faroes, he has accepted that policy cannot be made away from the particular locality. He envisaged a national framework, which will be decided in detail, implemented and administered locally.

His one stipulation was that everything that is caught must be landed. At present, because of the impossible rules the CFP is based on, nobody has any idea how much fish is really caught in Britain, by British or any other fishermen. Clearly, it is impossible to make policies on that kind of non-data. When some disagreement was expressed by representatives from Cornwall, Paterson replied that this argument proved the need to implement the national policy locally.

It is perhaps unfortunate that at this stage Mr Paterson could not answer the most difficult of all questions: what will happen if the other signatories of the treaty insist that no matter what sort of legislation the British Parliament passes, they have every right to go on having equal access to Community waters. That, as Rudyard Kipling said at the end of The Jungle Book, is another story.

The former Greek government is denying that it massaged the figures to enter the eurozone. They merely massaged … errrm … made mistakes in … no, that can’t be right ….miscalculated the figures after they had joined EMU.

The problem revolves round defence expenditure and not, as some of us may have supposed, the fantastic and ever growing cost of the recently finished Olympic Games. The fudging that went into that will not, presumably, be discussed for a few months. But we shall get to it, worry not.

Anyway, former economy and finance minister Yiannos Papantoniou has announced that the budget for 1997-9 is absolutely above board.

"There were no significant military orders at the time," – he said.

"This campaign by the new government has two aims: to discredit (the socialist party) PASOK and its tenure in office and to create an alibi for abandoning its extravagant pre-election promises," PASOK [the Greek Socialist Party] economic policy coordinator Theodore Pangalos said.

"Retroactively applied to spending on a huge, 10-year armaments programme running since 1999, the bulk of which was paid for in 2000-2002, the change resulted in budget deficits exceeding the three percent deficit rule."

Outgoing Internal Market Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, the only one of that august body to vote against negotiations with Turkey, has given a choleric interview to Le Monde.

He remains opposed to Turkey’s entry because of its human rights record and thinks that the Rubicon had been crossed in Helsinki in 1999 when that country was given candidate status. (Though that had been done for no greater reason but to shut everybody up.)

Nor is Bolkestein greatly taken with the idea of a never-ending expansion. The only thing that could prevent an EU of 40 members in his opinion, is a no vote in a referendum somewhere. Since he is talking about putative applicants, a no vote is unlikely. And while we are on the subject: 40? Where does he get all those countries? Will Central Asia and North Africa suddenly become Europe?

According to Mr Bolkestein most governments and Commissioners are against Turkey’s membership and if there had been a secret vote, the result would have been very different. As it is, foreign ministers want to appear nice and nobody dares to say no. The EU will become unmanageable, he warns.

As we predicted in a previous posting, Marta Andreasen, the whistle-blowing chief accountant at the European Commission has now been fired after a hearing by what can only be described as a kangaroo court (a term, incidentally, that seems not to be of Australian but American origjn, first used in Texas in the 1840s).

Ms Andreasen had complained publicly of the extraordinary accounting practices in the Commission, which apparently did not involve anything so well-used as double-entry book-keeping. Her description of the European Union’s book-keeping as “Enron-style” financing has since been validated by a number of other leaked memos.

But Neil Kinnock the ougoing Commissioner, appointed to fight fraud and reform the Commission, was not going to be sidetracked by anything so mundane as the truth. Under his guidance and after a secret tribunal, Ms Andreasen was fired for unspecified crimes of breaking protocol and disloyalty.

One interesting accusation is that she had not told the truth about her previous employment, though, presumably, the European Commission could easily have found out. Ms Andreasen had been chief accountant with the OECD and was suspended in 1998 for making similar accusations about that organization’s accounting practices.

The Commission tribunal clearly chose to view this as an indication that Marta Andreasen is a troublemaker, despite the fact that her accusations as far as the Commission goes, are accurate. Might there not be another explanation: international and transnational bodies, who command vast amounts of taxpayers’ money do not feel that they have to abide by accepted rules of accounting honesty. One hopes that Ms Andreasen will now abandon her lonely crusade to bring these matters to light and find herself an accounting job with a private firm somewhere.

At midnight tonight, this Blogger will be sailing off into the darkness aboard one of the few remaining Fleetwood trawlers – heavily laden with sea-sickness pills (me, that is) - to experience personally the depredations of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy.

If I survive the experience, I will be reporting my findings on this Blog sometime late Friday or early Saturday.

In the meantime, I leave the Blog, by way of my last will and testament, in the capable hands of my colleague. This means, no doubt, that the hit rate will soar – once people realise that they do not have to wade through my laborious posts to get to her material. For the time being, therefore, happy blogging. Make the most of it while you can.

My colleague has recently written about the soon-to-be former-external affairs commissioner, Christopher Patten, suggesting that, although we always acknowledged his knowledge and intelligence, we may well have to revise our opinions.

If we needed any more incentive to do so, that was amply provided in the print edition of The Times, with a story headed "Britain winning fight in Europe, says Patten". The text (at the time of writing) was not available on the internet, owing to a mix-up by the Times staff, who have posted the wrong story under the headline.

For those thus deprived, the essence of Patten’s claim is that "Britain is winning its way in Brussels, European integration is ‘at the end of the road’, and the Franco-German axis is seriously weakened". Furthermore, "everyone thinks it is going in our direction – everyone thinks that the constitutional treaty, for example, represents a huge achievement for British diplomacy."

"For us to propose throwing out the treaty and opening up all these arguments again is crazy," says Patten. "It does represent most of the things we are arguing for. Why are Fabius and others in France going to campaign against the treaty? Because they think it is too British".

"The process of economic and political integration is in most respects at the end of the road", he adds, then arguing of the current state of the EU, "This is very different from the original vision. I certainly believe that this is a different vision from the one which is defined by conventional Europhile rhetoric".

Thus, after more in this vein, Pattern concludes, "The main problem with the EU is not what it does, but its failure to win hearts and minds." He feels the EU is such a success – creating a single market, a single currency and co-operating on justice and environmental issues – that it will be copied around the world.

One only has to read my earlier Blog to see immediately how hollow is Patten’s claim that "The process of economic and political integration is in most respects at the end of the road". In fact, "hollow" is too much of an understatement – "laughable" might be more appropriate. If the man really believes what he is saying that he is so stupid that he should not be let out alone.

Stupid he may be, but we do not believe that anyone outside a registered institution can be that deficient. But the alternatives are either that he is lying, or that he suffers from that peculiar delusion of the "chattering classes" of having convinced himself that what he speaks and believe is the truth.

This, however, is the man who is probably going to lead the "yes" campaign on the constitution, so his remarks may also be seen in the context of his opening shots of the campaign. That would not make them any less mendacious but it does define the context.

This should give us some comfort. If the "yes" campaign is going to front as its main arguments that the constitution represents a victory for Britain, and that the process of economic and political integration is "… at the end of the road", then we are going to have a very easy time of it.

The EU commission has started infringement procedures against France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland for alleged breaches of procurement law, accusing the four governments of favouring the computer chip maker Intel when awarding public contracts.

It seems that some government offices in each of the four countries have been specifying Intel chips, or chips that work at the same speed as Intel's technology, when ordering their computer systems. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a rival chip maker, had complained ten months ago that the practice was anti-competitive, and the commission largely agreed.

But the substance of the commission’s case seems bizarre. "You can specify the performance you are looking for in a particular computer problem, but not a specification that can only be met by one manufacturer," says commission spokesman Jonathan Todd.

Quelle horreur! What next! Public authorities actually awarding contracts on the basis of excellence, innovation and superior performance. That would never do. What do you think we are – a competitive economy? Hence the approval of the move by AMD, whose spokesman Michael Simonoff purred, "It shows they (the commission) are committed to creating a level playing field."

Ah yes, forgot… the level playing field.

The front page of the Times business section today (print edition) proclaims: "Britain fingered as the worst for breaches of EU tax laws". The accompanying story is given a different headline in the online edition where it becomes "Breaches of EU tax law could cost UK billions". Either way, the message is clear – the UK is breaching "EU tax law".

But hang on a minute, isn't tax a matter for nation states and wasn't tax one of Blair's "red lines" during the constitutional treaty negotiations? So how come there is such a thing as "EU tax law" - apart from VAT?

Regular readers of this Blog, of course, know the answer to this, as we have dealt with this issue several times (click here) and here. Circumventing the treaties, the commission with the ECJ have gradually, insidiously widened the envelope, using "Single Market" provisions to bring taxation into the net.

But this is by no means the only area. In the field of Justice and Home affairs, we see that, through the outwardly benign mechanism of establishing a European Police College and the development of Europol, the EU is gradually harmonising the police forces in the member states.

Through the Fisheries Control Agency, the EU has designs on setting up its own inspection service equipped with its own patrol vessels and surveillance aircraft – a proto EU navy and airforce and, through the increasing allocation of research funds, the EU is developing its own space programme.

Then there is defence. We warned as recently as yesterday that integration was proceeding apace. But what is particularly chilling – and instructive - is a recently published paper by the European Policy Centre (with the support of the EU commission) entitled "ESDP: The State of Play". Its authors write:

The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is beginning to move forward… The EU is moving to implement the proposals contained in the Solana EU Security Strategy (ESS), agreed last December by the European Council. In June the EU agreed a new constitutional treaty that contains far-reaching proposals for “permanent structured cooperation” in defence. Rather than waiting for the eventual full ratification of the new Constitution by the 25, the Member States have already begun to lift key defence provisions for immediate adoption…

Even those of us who have disagreed on most matters with Chris Patten, outgoing External Relations Commissioner and future leader of the yes campaign, have always acknowledged his knowledge and intelligence. We may well have to revise our opinions, if his introduction to a collection of essays published by Policy Exchange and entitled The Perfect Union? New Europe and the EU is anything to go by.

The pamphlet is of some interest, anyway, as it discusses the great opportunities and certain difficulties of enlargement to the east, and we shall be discussing it in the future. However, our attention was caught by Mr Patten’s following rather curious comments:

“Our relationship with Russia, for example, will be greatly enriched by enlargement. We have over the years worked hard, if not always successfully, to develop a deep, strategic partnership with our largest neighbour. We have a major stake in doing so; and enlargement will increase that stake – the new EU will account for more than 50% of Russia’s external trade, and will continue to be a significant supplier of energy as we as a factor for stability on the EU’s eastern borders. Our incentive to instil democratic, market-oriented reforms in Russia, and Russia’s incentive to adopt EU standards and practices will only grow.”

Yesterday’s Le Figaro carried a rather sad little article. Well, I thought it was sad, though some people may laugh. Apparently, a number of French and international worthies, led by the author Maurice Druon, representing that august institution, the Académie française, have published a manifesto or an open letter to the European Council, demanding that French be nominated as the “langue juridique de l’Europe”, the legal or juridical language of Europe (by which they presumably mean the European Union).

This, as the newspaper says, is a last ditch attempt to stem the growth of English as the preferred language of that institution.

For a long time the EEC/EC/EU remained the only international body that produced its documents in French first and other languages, including English, late second. This has been changing, as, indeed, has the knowledge of French across the Continent.

Numerous researches have shown that even before the eastward enlargement English was the preferred second language in most member states. For a year or so before the actual enlargement the Institute française and other organizations spent a great deal of money trying to interest the applicant members in studying French, accepting French as the leading language and France as the leading country of Europe. This has not really worked, though I can testify that their Quatorze Juillet parties were magnificent.

In 1986, as Le Figaro points out, around 58 per cent of EU documents were first produced in the language of Molière, in 1997 around 40 per cent and now less than 30 per cent. They do, of course, get published in French, but only at the same time as in other languages. The language of Shakespeare comes first. Zut, alors. On ne peut supporter ça.

M Druon has collected signatures from outside France as well, though even Le Figaro appears to be somewhat bemused by the apparently highly important but, really, rather eclectic list: Mario Soares, former President of Portugal, Federico Mayor, former Education Minister of Spain and former Director-General of UNESCO, Suzanna Agnelli, former Italian Foreign Minister, Adrian Nastase, Prime Minister of Romania and Simeon Saxe-Coburg, Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Dora Bakyianni, Mayor of Athens, Bronislaw Geremek, former Polish Foreign Minister and the Albanian writer Ismaïl Kadare.

One fears that even such an illustrious list will not reverse the well-established trend. Surely, all these French and other dignitaries remember the failed attempt to prevent the usage of English words in the French language and the creation of franglais by law as well as the equally doomed attempt to force all French scientific conferences to conduct their sessions in French only. The latter came to nothing when French scientists protested that, should the law be passed, they would not be able to hold international conferences ever again.

It's desk clearing time… or a pre-emptive strike. Last July we noted that the EU commission was threatening the German government with a starring role in the European Court of Justice unless it sorted out the law that made car-maker Volkswagen immune from take-overs.

At the time, we ventured that this would be a great test for (then) commission-president designate Barroso, as to whether he would see this issue though and actually make good the threat.

As it happens, though, he is not to be given the chance. With over two weeks to go before he assumes office the "pro-market" Dutch single market commissioner Frits Bolkestein has got in first and made the referral, leaving the new commission only the role of seeing through the case.

The complexities of this issue were rehearsed in our earlier Blog on the subject, with Schöder being trapped between the rock of the Länder and the hard place of the commission, unable to satisfy either.

But what is particularly interesting about yesterday’s development is the way Bolkestein has committed the Barroso commission to a course of action of which ot may or may not approve.

Theoretically, the new commission is a "new broom" that can set its own policy direction but this episode, like others – such as the announcement of spending plans up to 2007 - means that, whatever its inclinations, Barroso and his merry men and women will be passengers on the gravy train for some years to come.

That is the nature of the system. In the same way that the European parliament will be called upon to pass legislation at second and third reading that was introduced to a completely different parliament, so is the commission prisoner of a system over which it has little immediate control.

This rather puts the media prattle about the intentions of the Barroso commission in perspective. The will be different talking heads at the press conferences and new names to learn but, for the next few years at least – if not longer – there will be no real change.

On top of the Germans moving in to sell its surplus tanks to Turkey on the back of the EU commission agreeing to recommend opening accession negotiations with Turkey, it appears that Herr Schröder has been busy elsewhere in his role of premier arms salesman, propelling Germany into fourth place in the world league of arms exporters, displacing Britain.

Thus runs a report in The Times today, based on figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Of course, now that the British government has decided to buy its military trucks from Germany, that will further improve Germany’s position as - in abandoning our domestic market - we will have opted out of the export market as well.

As to the German activity, The Times finds rather odd, given that the Schröder’s Social Democrats are in coalition with the pacifist Green Party.

Nevertheless, despite a German law that bars the sale of weapons to so-called "areas of tension", the SDP and the peace-loving Greens stood by while Schröder this month discussed the supply of submarines to India, and the government supplied 20 Fuchs armoured transporters to Iraq, even though the German military are kept well clear.

Schröder is also sniffing round Libya to see whether he can pick up some trade there, in the wake of the embargo being lifted there and, alongside Chirac, he is a keen proponent of lifting the arms ban on China.

Nevertheless, the bulk of German arms exports has gone to Nato countries, led by the United States, which has bought €685 million (£472 million) of guns in the past three years. Spain spent €232 million on tanks and anti-tank mortars, and Greece bought €266 million of mortars. Smaller sales have also been agreed with India and South Korea. Germany has also supplied Israel and, just to be even-handed, the United Arab Emirates.

One wonders, though, what the Greeks, as recipients of German arms, must be thinking of Schröder's enthusiasm for dealing with Turkey, when the Greek English-language newspaper Kathimerini recently reported that six formations of Turkish fighter jets entered the Athens Flight Information Region (FIR) seven times, with the twelve jets chased off by as many Greek aircraft after “simulated” dogfights, endangering – so it is claimed – civilian air traffic.

They may be less than pleased to learn that Germany, in addition to flogging tanks to the Turks, is also pushing hard for the airforce to buy up some Eurofighters. Could be interesting if the Greeks and Turks go to war again.

Italian politicians and the media have been upset at the treatment meted out to their Commissioner, Rocco Buttiglione, described in a previous blog. There have been all kinds of rows with those on the left maintaining that this is the direct result of Prime Minister Berlusconi’s somewhat belligerent attitude to the rest of Europe and, for that matter, the world.

Those on the right, on the other hand, see the whole row as an attack on Italy and on values that are reasonably close to those held by a very large number of people in that country, certainly by most members of the Catholic Church. Nor are Italians too keen on the notion of upstart MEPs attacking the man, known as “the Philosopher” because of this academic background.

The most apposite comment was made by the Justice Minister Roberto Castelli:

“This decision shows the real face of Europe, a face which we don't like. It's fundamentalist, which is absolutely not on.”

The choice of a European supplier for British Army trucks - announced yesterday by the MoD – has such profound implications for UK defence policy that it cannot just be dismissed as a "best value" procurement decision.

Unless the MoD can come up with a very, very convincing justification for selecting MAN-Nutzfahrzeuge, there are good reasons for suspecting that there is a broader political agenda at play.

Not least, there are shades of the Sikorsky – Westland drama here, in that the choice was essentially between an American-led consortium, in Stewart and Stevenson, fronting up the British companies LDV Limited, Multidrive Limited and Lex Defence, and the European supplier MAN-Nutzfahrzeuge.

Unlike the Conservative government in 1985, however, this Labour administration has gone for the European option, making the British Army wholly reliant of German manufactured equipment.

What gets the political antenna twitching though are two separate issues. The first is the EU commission's publication of 23 September of this year the Green Paper on Defence Procurement (COM(2004) 608 final), flagged up in our earlier Blog (sleepwalking into disaster).

In this Blog, we noted that the commission stated that "the credibility of European defence policy depends on the existence and development of a European capacity and a strengthening of the industrial and technological base of the defence sector". It said it was anxious to work with the European Defence Agency to promote common, EU-wide procurement and standardisation throughout the forces of member states.

While it cannot yet be stated with any certainty that the choice of a German supplier of British Army trucks is at all influenced by this Green Paper and the commission's objective, it can be stated with certainty that it certainly does conform with the commission's objectives. On the other hand, the choice of a US-led consortium would confound the them.

The second issue of note is the recent rejection by the US congress of the ITAR waiver, whence it will be recalled that defence secretary Hoon threatened Rumsfeld that congressional opposition to the waivers "could steer London away from billions of dollars' of U.S. weapon purchases."

The waiver was vetoed on 6 October and here we are on 13 October learning that the UK has gone for a European rather than US option in selecting crucial British Army equipment.

On their own, these two issues could still, perhaps, be dismissed as coincidence, but there is another more profound factor in the wings. Long gone are the days when trucks – Army trucks, at least – were simply boxes on wheels, used to ship men and materiel. They are highly sophisticated pieces of equipment, which mesh into the whole logistics and combat system, relying on complex electronics to keep them integrated.

Surprise, surprise, MAN Nutzfahrzeuge AG is not just a truck manufacturer. It also produces a sophisticated electronic fleet management system, called "Telematics" which has been incorporated into the military programme, thus enabling what it calls "Network Centric Logistics".

This starts ringing alarm bells. At the forefront of modern military technology, is the concept of "digitising the battlespace", providing command and control capability throughout the force, with – in the jargon of the speciality – "a horizontally and vertically integrated digital information network that supports warfighting systems and assures command and control decision cycle superiority."

The logistic network is a central part of that capability, which will be incorporated into the British Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) which is at the heart of Hoon’s defence review, and underpins his cutting back of infantry strength.

The concept itself is based on the US Future Combat System (FCS) and the political implications of this system have been discussed in an earlier Blog.

In this respect, the crucial question for the UK, on the basis that it cannot afford to develop the system on its own, is whether it goes for European or US cooperation. If it chooses European cooperation, then it is highly unlikely that the resultant system will be compatible with the US, which will then mean that combined operations with US forces, on any scale, will effectively ruled out.

We are, therefore, in a situation where the choice of technology is actually dictating and circumscribing political choices, to the extent that we are having to choose between the US or Europe, and can no longer act in our traditional role as a bridge between the two. It has to be one or the other, and the selection of MAN Nutzfahrzeuge drags us further into the European camp.

Political issues aside, there are also profound technical issues. Although "tactical internet" and "Integrated Digital Information Networks" on the battlefield are new concepts, much of the US technology is battle-proven, having been deployed in the Iraq war, and the US Army is already deploying the technology in its "Interim Armoured Vehicle", the Stryker, with at least two brigades up and running.

For the Europeans, the concept is theoretical, with no proven experience. No European manufacturer, or armed service, has yet been able to put the technology into the field, yet we are drifting into a situation were we are being committed to participation in an untried European programme.

Furthermore, although at a relatively minor level compared to the electronic systems, with the experience of Iraq and other war zones, trucks are being fitted for optional installation of appliqué armour, to protect against mines, RPG7s and roadside bombs. And which country is world leader in armour technology? You guessed it, the Americans… and we are opting for German equipment.

All of this discounts the jobs issue, where the Stewart and Stevenson option would ensure that the vehicles were built in Britain by British workers. to say nothing of throwing away the possibility of export sales by abandoning domestic manufacturing. And, Xenophobic or not, there is the highly sensitive issue of British forces relying on German Army trucks. There are still many people around with memories of the Second World War who will feel uneasy at the prospect.

But the central issue, which has to be addressed, and addressed urgently, is whether the MAN Nutzfahrzeuge decision is politically driven, and part of an undeclared agenda which has at its heart European defence integration – by stealth. It this is the agenda, then we are putting the whole of the US special relationship at risk, with untold political consequences.

What is the London Assembly for? One struggles to explain the need for such a completely useless and unnecessary body. It cannot even control the pharaonic plans of a megalomaniac Mayor, who is equally unnecessary for London’s well-being. Given that the business of London is business, if one may misquote President Calvin Coolidge, having a severely anti-business, tax-and-regulation-mad Mayor is the height of lunacy.

Today the London Assembly had its once a month plenary meeting, which lasted from ten o’clock till lunchtime. During that Lord Coe and Ken Livingstone were questioned on the Olympic bid and turned extremely coy on the subject of financial details.

Then they had the most extraordinary debate. Apparently, one of its members, Brian Coleman, who is also the Chairman of the Assembly, had had the temerity to express his private view that the United States was right not to sign the Kyoto Protocol. It seems this wretched Protocol has now become one of the no-go areas for speech or writing. Perhaps, next time there are calls for amending the blasphemy legislation, the Kyoto Protocol should be included or, even, made the only dogma that cannot be criticized, no matter how many scientists and economists may cast doubt on it.

To start with, the Greens, supported by the Labour group put down a motion of censure, replete with various mis-statements:

“This Assembly notes the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a genuine threat and reaffirms the Assembly’s support for firm action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to tackle climate change.

This Assembly condemns the statement made by the Chair of the Assembly on the website of the Enfield and Barnet United Nations Association in which he expresses support for the United States Government’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol and in which he expresses doubts about the reality of global warming.

This Assembly urges the Chair of the Assembly to retract his comments.”

Delete all references to Chair of the Assembly and replace with the Assembly Member for Barnet and Camden.

In second paragraph replace condemns with “disagrees with”.

Motion would then read:-

“This Assembly notes the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a genuine threat and reaffirms the Assembly’s support for firm action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to tackle climate change.

This Assembly disagrees with the statement made by the Assembly Member for Barnet and Camden on the website of the Enfield and Barnet United Nations Association in which he expresses support for the United States Government’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol and in which he expresses doubts about the reality of global warming.

This Assembly urges the Assembly Member for Barnet & Camden to retract his comments.”

Delete all words except "This assembly condemns..." and replace with

"..any attempt to censure or to restrict the freedom of speech of its Members when speaking in a private or party capacity"

Without any great drama in the popular press, the MoD is currently negotiating a major contract for the supply of trucks for the British Army, worth over £1 billion.

The contract, the biggest in 25 years, covers the supply of 5,000 cargo and recovery trucks, with delivery scheduled to start in 2007. The MoD has also placed an option for further vehicles.

And who will supply these trucks? Well, it now seems that the MoD has chosen the subsidiary of the German engineering conglomerate MAN, MAN-Nutzfahrzeuge, as the preferred bidder. Negotiations will now continue on an exclusive basis.

MAN, whose activities range from truck-making to plant engineering and printing machinery, managed to overcome competition from German-U.S. auto giant DaimlerChrysler and U.S. truck makers Oshkosh and Stewart and Stevenson.

The latter firm, a Texas based operation, teamed with UK firms LDV Limited, Multidrive Limited and Lex Defence and intended to build the trucks in Birmingham, England. Max L. Lukens, President and Chief Executive Officer, expressed "disappointment" in the decision, and well he might.

With a track record of building tactical vehicles for the US Army, this company would have been ideal, not only because it is highly experienced, but also because of those links with the US Army, with which the British forces operate closely. This move can only increase the growing UK-US divide.

A serious questions now has to be asked as to why the UK, it seems, can no longer build essential equipment for its own Army, and is buying from a European source, with the concomitant loss of jobs.

Anyone who has ever had to take children anywhere is familiar with that constantly recurring question. The answer is usually: nearly there or just a little way to go.

The question has been in my mind on the subject of policing. Like many other people I remember the Paris police some years ago, with the flics sitting in their mobile cages, waiting for a chance to take their resentments out on those who passed them with disdain. I also remember the militiamen (or millymen, as we called them) in Moscow in the last months of the Soviet Union.

Friends and colleagues who have worked in the European Parliament have told me of the unreality of entering a building, which was cut off from the rest of the city mentally and surrounded by barbed wire and armoured vehicles physically.

Through all this I, like so many, smirked in a superior fashion and thought of our own friendly police. Not very efficient, to be sure, but superlative in crowd control and, above all, not a breed apart. Well, I smirk no longer. Are we there yet? Nearly there.

On Monday I had to walk through the corridors of Parliament in pursuit of some amendments to a piece of legislation that is going through the House of Lords and other matters. To my shock I encountered one or two armed or, at least, heavily encumbered with hardware police officers at every single door. These were not the usual friendly security officers but definitely the British equivalent of les flics. Together with the armed police inside and outside the entrances they gave the place an air of a mini-police state. As I told friends in a shocked tone, I had not encountered anything like this since those weeks in Moscow a year or so before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Are we there yet? Nearly there.

Yesterday I found that Parliament Square was completely closed off, with large numbers of police officers milling all round it. Rather wildly I thought of a plan of running tours for Londoners in the area, so they can see real live police officers in action: chatting to people, preventing them from crossing roads, telling them the time, all the things we have forgotten.

Why were they doing this? Because the Hunting Bill was having its Second Reading in the House of Lords and, who knows, there might have been a demonstration. In fact, there was not a single demonstrator. Why would there be? The House of Lords was going to have a serious debate (again) and the Countryside Alliance adopted a different strategy: that of letter writing and sending out political briefs. It seems nobody bothered to tell the police. So they poured their forces there and closed off Parliament Square for the benefit of half a dozen opponents of hunting who stood outside the Treasury, peaceably carrying placards and stuffed animals. Hardly a danger to the realm.

In the evening I listened to a talk given by Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch and newspaper proprietor, a refugee from Putin’s Russia. In reply to a question about whether Russians are ready for democracy he said that in his opinion Russians were perfectly capable of living their own lives and running their own businesses but they had not reached the next stage, being able to fight for the right to do all those things. He compared that with Britain where nearly half a million people went out on the streets to protest against the banning of foxhunting. None of the glum audience present bothered to point out the obvious fact that it did them no good at all.

Berezovsky then added that actually, the differences between the two political systems were not so great. In the West riots were greeted with rubber bullets, in Russia with real ones. In the audience we looked at each other and found it impossible to dismiss such a wild allegation with a smirk.

Are we there yet? Just a little way to go.

More woes for the euro, according to the The Times business section today.

Despite the extravagant claims for "price transparency" and the theory that this would push prices down, the actual prices of consumer goods in the different eurozone countries are nearly as far apart as they were at the time of the introduction of euro banknotes and coins three years ago

Advocates of the single currency had confidently predicted that the euro would overcome the difficulties consumers had in comparing prices when they were expressed in different currencies, but the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein investment bank has blown that comfortable little fantasy apart.

Prices, it found, are still as divergent as they were when the single currency was introduced physically. Furthermore, DKW said it might take 20 years before prices in euroland had come as much into line as those in the states of America. The difference in prices across six eurozone cities was an average 14.5 per cent this year, according to DKW. The gap had narrowed only slightly from 14.9 per cent last year.

This allowed Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor, to crow triumphantly – with some justification: “So much for claims that the single currency would make the market far more effective. This is one more piece of evidence that it’s free trade and not the currency that matters.”

Actually, the only surprising thing is that anybody actually thought it would be any different. I could not tell you offhand how long the UK has been a single currency area - no doubt someone will tell me – but prices in Yorkshire are still very different from those in London and then, even in Yorkshire, there are substantial variations.

Employing the famous "bacon buttie" standard, a three-rasher teacake in the outskirts of Bradford will cost you £1.20 compared with £1.80 for two rashers on toast in York. In a hundred years time, no doubt, bacon butties will still be cheaper in Bradford – just supposing the Moslems haven't taken over completely, in which case they will be banned. That is the way things work.

Only a moron selling a slightly dodgy euro would ever think it could be any different.

If I were a betting man, I would wager that not one in a hundred of our readers actually knows what ITAR stands for - not that there is any shame in that. Only with the advantage of advanced warning could I tell you what it means. However, mystery or not, ITAR is important or, to be more specific, the waiver is or, to be even more specific, the lack of one.

To clear up one part of the mystery, ITAR stands for "International Traffic in Arms Regulations". It is this legislation that governs the issue of export licences of military equipment (including dual-use technology) from the US, imposing considerable restrictions on what can be exported, and to whom, and creating horrendous red-tape and delays, even when export is permitted.

Predictably, the UK, which does considerable business with US military equipment producers, has been anxious to obtain a "waiver" under US law, which would allow a much more relaxed regime, allowing much more rapid transfer of technology and easier co-operation.

Nevertheless, the path towards the "waiver" has been long and tortuous. Clinton was not interested, and neither was Bush Snr, but his son seemed and, last year, it looked as if the UK (and Australia) were going to be successful in gaining the coveted status of exempt nations.

However, earlier this month, signs that things were amiss became public when Harry Stonecipher, CEO of Boeing openly stated that he was being prevented from sharing even non classified technology with the UK.

Now, the bad news is official. According to DefenseNews (11 October), after last-minute negotiations, at the end of a prolonged campaign spanning many years, the provision for the waiver was stripped from the 2005 Defense Authorization Act, in which it had been inserted. The President was given no choice once the both Houses of Congress had made it known they would not pass the Bill by its 8 October deadline, unless it was removed.

The deletion was a blow to the Bush administration, which had wanted to reward Blair for his support in Iraq, but it represented a victory for House conservatives who were worried that such exemptions would make it easier for critical technology to land in enemy hands.

Although proponents of the waiver had argued that such exemptions would boost trade and would help U.S. troops work better with close allies, these arguments were rejected by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, who led the campaign to block the proposal.

Cited by DefenseNews, Hunter said, "The problem is not with the leadership of Australia or Britain… (it) is the porous nature of the system in which front companies and unscrupulous individuals move technologies to people who one day may be trying to kill not only Americans on the battlefield but Brits and Aussies too."

Although nothing of this has percolated into the British media, defence secretary Hoon will have taken the rejection badly. In a stinging later last July, he told Donald Rumsfeld that congressional opposition to the waivers could steer London away from billions of dollars’ of U.S. weapon purchases.

"The waiver was important because of the increasingly globalized nature of the defence industry," one MoD official said. "Under ITAR, American and British companies are unable to have collaborative development of technology without an awful lot of red tape."

But this is more than a matter of "red-tape". In July 2003, the House of Commons Defence Committee on Defence Procurement, in its Eighth Report of Session 2002–03, put the issue in perspective when it wrote (para 54):

The importance of the waiver extends beyond its immediate procedural and legal scope, because it is a touchstone for our relations with our closest ally. A failure to implement this first modest step in bringing closer together the industrial side of that alliance has the potential to become the thin end of a damaging and undesirable wedge in the political side.

…what is actually being asked for is something quite modest, it is a waiver of ITAR regulations in relation to unclassified information, so it ought not to raise any heroic problems of security classification or national security at all. We are disappointed therefore about the suspicion with which some in Congress have viewed the ITAR waiver, not only because the benefits for both the US and UK remain unfulfilled, but more importantly because of the message that the delay conveys about the nature of the UK-US relationship.

In this week’s edition of Eurofacts, Ian Milne presents a novel piece entitled "The Road to Self-Government", sketching out the hypothetical scenario of a Britain that has just rejected membership of the EU after a referendum on 21 June 2007.

Using this as his "peg", Milne then sketches out some of the measures, in the form of a letter to the heads of states and governments of the remaining 24 members, that the then government would take to restore the UK to the status of an independent sovereign state.

Necessarily brief – giving the publishing medium – this is nevertheless precisely the sort of work that the Eurosceptic movement should be undertaking and, for that, Milne should be commended. The work is needed for two separate and distinct reasons.

The first and more immediate reason is to provide a "safety net" for the EU constitutional referendum campaign. Here, although the "no" campaigns (or most of them) will seek to ensure that only the EU constitution is put before the public, the "yes" campaign – and some factions in the "no" camp – will undoubtedly seek to present the issue as an EU "in-out" battle.

Although few people might believe this, enough doubt might be sowed for them to fear that a "no" vote might be the first step towards withdrawal and that, given an overwhelming rejection of the constitution, it could create an unstoppable momentum toward the UK leaving the EU. Fed with a diet of scare stories from the "yes" campaign, there might then be a sufficient number who would vote for the constitution, not from any conviction, but simply for fear of what might follow a rejection.

The purpose of the "safety net" therefore, is to present to the public a positive picture of the consequences of withdrawal – should that eventually happen – in order to demonstrate that, far from an event that is to be feared, the overall outcome would be beneficial. Thus, while not actively making the case for withdrawal, the argument serves to reassure voters that, if the post constitutional rejection scenario did lead to withdrawal, there would be nothing to worry about.

As to the second reason, this is essentially a longer-term requirement, addressing one of the central defects of the Eurosceptic cause, in that advocates of withdrawal have never been able to present a coherent, fully-worked out alternative to membership of the EU. This allows critics of the movement to claim that Euroscepticism is a negative philosophy, and enables them to capture the high ground with a "positive" agenda".

While some may argue that Euroscepticism does not need to address alternatives in any detail – on the basis that the alternative to committing suicide is simply not committing suicide - in the real world it must be recognised that, after thirty years of integration, we cannot simply turn the clock back to the state of play before we joined the Communities. Time has moved on, and we need to look carefully at what Britain would look like once we had regained our sovereignty, and how we made the most of our newly restored freedom to govern ourselves.

In this context, much of what Milne has to say is superficial, but we do not criticise him for that. He has offered what was called in the TV game show University Challenge "a starter for ten". It is us to us, now – all of us – to take up the baton (if you will accept the mixed metaphor) and develop Milne’s themes, and add others, to create a workable template for a post-EU Britain.

We, on this Blog, have been mildly criticised for dealing with the negative aspects of the EU – in our concentration on the EU myths – but we do not apologise for that. This work, and creating a new template, are not mutually exclusive. But we do accept that we should pick up where Milne leaves off, and add our views of what should be done in the event that the UK does leave the EU, if for no other reason than this might hasten the eventuality.

Although France has been particularly voluble in its opposition to Turkey’s entry to the EU. Germany’s Schröder has been remarkably supportive, a rather surprising stance given that the 2.5 million Turks already living in Germany are creating considerable stresses and, in a recent survey of public opinion, 57 percent opposed Turkish accession, up 6 percentage points since April.

But, as did Italy find itself enthusiastically in favour of lifting the arm embargo on Libya, with Chirac supporting China in its efforts to have its embargo lifted, so it seems that Schröder’s enthusiasm for Turkey might not be as principled as he would perhaps have us believe.

According to Deutsche Welle, barely a week after the EU commission recommended initiating membership talks with Turkey, guess what - the German government is salivating at the thought of selling several hundred of its Leopard 2 tanks, surplus to Bundeswehr requirements … to Turkey.

Somewhat giving the game away, defence minister Peter Struck said last week that the progress Turkey has made on opening negotiations to join the European Union mean arms sales should no longer be a taboo subject.

Five years ago, a proposal to sell the same tanks to Turkey provoked one of the worst conflicts within Germany's ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens.

At the time, the concern was about the oppression of the country's Kurdish minority but now, with Turkey having made such progress with its human rights, and on its way to becoming one of the family, it seems there is now little to prevent the German Army selling off its surplus kit at a handsome profit.

Doncha love these principled Continentals.

That is one of the few weapons they have… The EU would be plunged into a crisis which would hurt workers the most if member states reject the proposed EU constitution says Jose Manuel Durao Barroso.

"If there was a crisis in Europe (because the treaty was not ratified) the first to be hurt would be workers and their families," he told reporters on the sidelines of a conference on the future of Europe organised by a Portuguese labour confederation.

"The owners of capital can with great ease transfer their investments outside of Europe, to China, to India, to other areas. But workers and their families are not thinking of moving, they want to stay in Europe," he added.

"That is why is is necessary to rally European public opinion around a European constitution which is naturally a compromise but which offers Europe the possibility of stability and more prosperity."

Bit short on detail is this report but one wonders on what grounds Barroso bases his claim, when all the evidence to date suggests that European integration has not exactly produced unalloyed benefits for "workers and their families".

Nevertheless, this again points to the tactics that will be (are being) used to support the constitution, and suggests that the "no campaign" will have to spend some time reassuring the electorate. However, ridicule might be an equally effective weapon.

In the wake of the Enron and Parmalat accountancy scandals, the EU commission is planning a "crackdown" on company balance sheet reporting practices.

This, we are told, comes as part of a broader drive by the commission to improve the rights of shareholders, increase corporate transparency and limit the risk of boardroom excesses and financial scandals.

Am I the only one who think that this is a bit rich, coming from an organisation that that has not had its own accounts approved for eight years and whose chief accountant, Marta Andreason, was suspended after publicly warning that its accounting methods left it wide open to fraud?

As part of the steady militarisation of the EU, in its quest to become a fully-fledged military power, the foreign ministers of the EU yesterday agreed to take over peacekeeping duties in Bosnia from NATO on 2 December.

The EU plans to insert a 7,000-strong force, code-named "Althea", which will replace the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR). It will be the biggest military operation yet undertaken by the EU.

But anyone who believes that the primary role of the force is peacekeeping needs to take careful note of the EU spokesman who announced the deployment.

"It will sustain our long-term objective of a stable, viable, peaceful and multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina, cooperating peacefully with its neighbors and irreversibly on track towards EU membership," he said.

And if, like Croatia, the Bosnians do not want to be led "irreversibly" towards EU membership by a military force, what then? Do we get EU troops storming the parliament building or what?

With the ink not even dry on the foreign ministers’ decision yesterday to lift the embargo on Libya and the race is on to sell Gaddafi some goodies from the arms manufacturers catalogues.

Worth $482 million in 2003, Libya’s defence budget is expected to provide rich pickings for EU member states and leading the sales rush is Italy, which was at the forefront in pushing for the lifting of the embargo.

Coincidentally, Silvio Berlusconi just happened to be in Libya on 7 October, inaugurating with Gaddafi a new Libya-Italy gas pipeline, although Berlusconi was beaten to the post by French foreign minister Michel Barnier, who arrived a day earlier, announcing that Chirac would visit by the end of the year.

Nevertheless, Italy expects to benefit most from the arms-sales bonanza, being particularly keen to sell a fleet of past patrol boats so that the Libyan navy can use to intercept illegal immigrants before they reach Italy. On top of that, Italian companies are looking to sell 42 aircraft equipped with radar, infrared sensors and high-definition TV cameras, to back up the sea patrols.

But, of course, all this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the decision to lift the arms embargo in the first place. That was strictly and exclusively because Gaddafi has decided to renounce WMD – not that he had any in the first place. But there you go…

According to an opinion poll done at the beginning of October, only 49 per cent of Croatians want their country to become part of the European Union. This is part of a steady trend.

The first poll on the subject was conducted in July 2000, when support for the proposal was 70 per cent. It peaked two years later, in July 2002, at 79.4 per cent and has been going down ever since, reaching 51 per cent in June and sinking below the half mark in the autumn.

Some of this is linked to the ebbing popularity of the rightist government of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader. This year his support rating also sank below the half mark.

However, dissatisfaction with the idea of joining the European Union is not only the result of the usual East European dislike of whatever government happens to be in power. It is generally assumed that, had the poll been conducted a week or so later, the result would have been even worse.

On October 6 the EU announced that, while it intended to negotiate with Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia for membership, it reserved the right to break off those negotiations at any time, if the candidates transgressed the EU’s standards of freedom, democracy and human rights protection. It is felt by many in the Zagreb official circles that these criteria are rather broadly and flexibly defined.

Though some officials and politicians, like Foreign Minister Miomir Zuzul, shrug off the problem, pointing out that either side can always break off negotiations, others disagree. One official in the Foreign Ministry said:

“This will create the impression that whenever it feels like it, Brussels can exert pressure on us, and, if we don’t let up, find an excuse to suspend negotiations, so all the sacrifices made so the country could be admitted into the EU could be in vain.”

Accountants are not normally known for their rebellious nature so it comes to something when, according to the Financial Times, the UK's highest accounting authority – the Accounting Standards Board (ASB)– has told the EU to get lost over its new version of international accounting standards, and suggested British companies should ignore it.

Less than three months before listed companies across the European Union are required to harmonise accounting standards, the system is now in total confusion over recent amendments to what are known as "derivatives regulations", coded "IAS 39".

Nor does Ian Mackintosh, the ASB's new chairman, think that the problems can be resolved quickly, so there is little chance that UK companies will be able to apply the new standard in 2005, as was intended.

At the heart of the problem, it seems, is that the original proposals were changed followed intense lobbying by French banks – they who looked after Saddam Hussein’s money - which argued that the original IAS 39 proposal, based on US accounting rules, would disrupt their risk management practices.

The ASB now says that the new accounting requirements had been "seriously weakened" by the amendment, allowing member states to opt in or out of tougher requirements, leaving the ASB doubtful about its own ability to force UK companies to adopt the tougher rules.

Competing on the world stage for first prize in understatement, an EU commission spokesman said that the situation was "less than ideal". Who said the British were not having an influence?

Normally, if an EU commissioner so much as spits, the ever-willing service de presse rushes out a release describing every monotonous detail. Not so it seems with energy commissioner Loyola de Palacio – until 1 November that is – who attended a conference on 28 September of this year and uttered what in many of the hallowed quarters of the EU would be seen as heresy.

And the nature of the heresy? Dr Loyola de Palacio say we must go nuclear.

Addressing industry representatives, NGOs and media, the commissioner emphasised that "Kyoto is a way, not the goal. The challenge of combating climate change is much more far reaching". Nuclear energy remains the only option to cut down on emissions," she maintained. "In the foreseeable future, we need nuclear power to keep emissions down." Pressed by horrified NGO representatives on nuclear safety and nuclear waste, she said that "there are risks, but they are calculable. There is no other option".

Strangely, when de Palacio decided to take legal action against Britain, earlier that month, for alleged failure to clean up the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, it was headline news. But, doing a "google" for any stories on de Palcio’s views on the need for nuclear power, not a single story showed up. They certainly kept that one quiet.

And one to go… Foreign ministers of the EU member states today agreed in Luxembourg to lift the arms embargo from Libya but refused to lift the arms ban on China. In passing, they also imposed a visa ban on senior officials from Burma

Perversely, Libya gets the green light because it has forsaken its plans to produce weapons of mass destruction, and because Italy wants to supply it (at a price) with equipment to help it crack down on illegal migration. China, on the other hand, which has no intentions whatsoever of abandoning its WMD, has France straining at the leash to sell it more, having lost its valued customer in Saddam Hussein.

However, the China issue is by no means over. A fudge is on the way, with ministers working on a stronger EU code of conduct on arms exports, to replace the ban – which then means that France (and Germany) can flog the Chinese anything they want, as the code has neither statutory effect nor status in international law.

Britain, as it has been for some time, is sitting on the fence with Jack Straw telling a press conference that "We're not in any sense 'against' the lifting of the embargo, but it's got to be done with a proper and sensible way." Straw denies that he is holding back for fear of offending the US.

The more principled Nordic countries are holding out, on the grounds that the Chinese human rights record still has not improved enough, while some of the recent accession countries are responding to US lobbying.

"There was no consensus", says German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, telling reporters that the issue "will require further discussions." Thus has he proved that understatement is not the monopoly of the British.

France will have another go immediately prior to the EU-China summit, scheduled for 8 December, while the Dutch presidency has promised to "speed up work on the code of conduct," in the meantime hoping for some "positive signals on Chinese side" in respect of improvement in civil rights.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Gregory Suchan would not have been impressed. Last week, during a visit to Brussels, he observed that "you can have an improving relationship with China and still have an arms embargo." But, he said, "We're not sitting here planning on how we will spank Europe."

Well... perhaps not all of Europe.

Rocco Buttiglione, the incoming Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner, is in trouble again. His investiture hearing consisted of two parts – he was interrogated by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs on Tuesday and by the Committee on Legal Affairs on Wednesday.

The second one of these seems to have gone fine but in the first session, Signor Buttiglione slipped up. He expressed the view that, as a staunch Catholic, he considers homosexuality to be a sin, hastening to add that he was not advocating that it be made illegal. There are many sins, such as accidie and gluttony, not to mention lust, that are not illegal. Similarly, there are many, too many, “crimes” such as parking offences, that are not sins in the theological sense. And that, you might think, would be that.

However, this view together with Buttiglione’s opinion on women’s place in society (somewhat similar, one gathers, to UKIP’s Godfrey Bloom’s, though perhaps more elegantly expressed) has damned him in the eyes of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

They recommended that Buttiglione be rejected by the plenary session of the European Parliament that will meet this week. Unfortunately, this is not only not binding as the BBC World Service website explained, it is completely pointless. The European Parliament cannot reject one commissioner. It is all or none. Even if they were all incensed by Signor Buttiglione’s opinions (which they will not be as some will be in agreement) they could do nothing about it as all the other commissioners passed with flying colours, having expressed all the correct opinions.

"Talking louder than everybody else, making a little bit more noise, and thinking that by yourself you constitute a majority."

That is the view of the French, by Bernard Kouchner, a physician and former Socialist cabinet minister, as cited by the International Herald Tribune today in a piece chronicling the growing unease about the EU constitution.

According to the IHT, and others, there is now a "kind of suppressed rage" in France "about coming to terms with an expanded EU that has drawn away from France, and decided, rather incontrovertibly, not to build itself on the basis of a French social model".

In practice, the IHT reminds us, that "social model" means ten percent unemployment, high taxes, an obese state apparatus.

Le Monde is called in aid to develop IHT’s thesis, with writer Eric Le Boucher explaining that it all started when "France lost the European battle to export its social model." He argues that the French political establishment has become an anachronism for Europe in arguing for a dead-on-its-feet social program

Another leading French political commentator, Alain Duhamel, says France has now devolved into a minority voice in providing ideas for Europe's future. More harshly, the historian Nicolas Bavarez, whose vision of his country's decline has become embedded in French consciousness, describes the phase as a new one in France's isolation.

France, according to the IHT, sees two problems with the direction the EU is going. Firstly, the draft constitution is seen as "officializing" a European economic and social system "along the lines of Tony Blair's flutes-and-strings re-orchestration of Margaret Thatcher's rough-edged policies". Secondly, the EU's 25 members have turned from France's notions of "Europe puissance," code for a kind of activism that many in Europe have come to regard as meaning confrontation with the United States.

Taken together, these have created enormous stress on the French political fabric, and it has begun to tear. And while this is most evident with the Socialist party, "in reality", says the IHT, "no one across the political spectrum has any enthusiasm for the constitution, which is seen at very best as a wash for France."

However, before taking any great satisfaction in what has become known as the déclinisme of France, and claiming success for the "Anglo Saxon model", it is as well to remember that the EU commission has its own agenda.

The word "liberalisation", which causes the French such profound despair, and some British such joy, has an alternative meaning. In community terms, it is not actually the denationalisation that we think it means. It is merely the precursor to detachment of enterprises from the nation state in order to reinvent them as European "champions".

In rejecting this, therefore – would that we knew it - we might have common cause with the French. We too can fall into the trap of "talking louder than everybody else, making a little bit more noise" but, with only 13 percent of the vote on the EU Council, we are not the majority either.

Philip Johnston, home affairs editor for The Daily Telegraph, today publishes his "Home front" column, entitled "We don't need a Euro police force".

It is a good enough piece, but we do wish he had read our Blog first, on the Eurocops – which would have added significantly to his understanding of the subject.

Nevertheless, Johnston does us a service, echoing a complaint aired may times on this Blog, to the effect that, while attention is focused elsewhere, EU integration goes marching on.

Thus, he points out that, while Parliament returns today to complete this year's legislative programme before next month's Queen's Speech, "much attention will focus on the fate of foxhunting, Tony Blair will be under renewed pressure over Iraq and there are other key measures - among them the Housing Bill and the Civil Contingencies Bill - to be concluded."

"You can be certain, however", he writes, "that a debate pencilled in for Thursday will attract little notice. The motion looks so innocuous that few may be aware of its implications. It is to 'take note of EU document relating to justice and home affairs work programme'."

And how accurately does he convey the reaction to such matters:

What a yawn. Yet another boring EU missive, full of impenetrable legalese and replete with apparently benign ambitions such as working towards the creation of an "area of freedom, justice and security" and the "mutual recognition" of laws in the interests of the "citizens of Europe". Who but a swivel-eyed Europhobe could be against that?

…what the European Commission has in mind is not benign at all. It maintains that the "European judicial area" will respect the legal traditions and systems of member states. But this is simply not true when you actually read what is being proposed.

Under the guise of co-operation, it seeks greater uniformity of law and criminal procedure - including minimum penalties and the end of life sentences - in the EU. In addition, the Commission wants to create a European Public Prosecutor, set up a European Corps of Border Guards, give more powers to Eurojust - a sort of centralised DPP - and allow the Dutch-based Europol agency to become an investigative police force, something we were told it would never
be when it was set up.