Is new Europe good for us?

Yes... says Diana Wallis, Yorkshire and Humber MEP

AT LAST we have woken up and realised that over the last year in Brussels a European Constitution has been drafted. The convention that was set the task of doing this was no big secret, it has been meeting in public, comprising elected government ministers, national MPs and MEPs and members of civil society.

It has tried to seek the views of European society at large, but until now in Britain it has been impossible to get a debate on the issue at all.

Why was this convention given the task of coming up with a proposal for a constitution? Very simply because the European Union is getting larger, from 15 to 25 members states. To accommodate this, the decision-making structure has to be simplified and clarified. Government ministers in their last big meeting in Nice failed to produce the answers.

The draft constitution spells out what decisions should be taken at European level. This will give the kind of transparency about the workings of Europe that have never been available to our citizens before.

They can clearly see what Europe is responsible for, rather than searching the impossible legalese of umpteen treaties. The proposed constitution actually gives more powers to national parliaments than they have enjoyed up until now: they could have rights both to initiate legislation and certainly have the right to intervene if they do not like the look of something coming from Brussels.

The truth is that a kind of "federal" Europe already exists. Within Europe all countries face many similar problems, so we work together and some 60 per cent of new laws passed in Britain now have had some European involvement.

We are not told what to do by others. British ministers help shape laws which are equally binding on other EU countries and as MEPs we do the same in the European Parliament.

We work within the EU because the world is now dominated by international organisations that no one country can control. Multinational companies have tentacles everywhere. Financial speculators can destroy national currencies at the touch of a keyboard. Organised crime pays no more heed to national boundaries than does environmental pollution.

This is not the result of some plot by foreigners; it is a simple reality with which European legislators have to deal.

If the current hysteria about the proposed EU constitution makes us debate our relationship with Europe then so much the better. I am one of those who believe that we would have benefited from a debate and a referendum at each treaty change.

Previous Labour and Conservative governments have denied us that possibility. If we as Britons are ever to be comfortable with our position as Europeans, we have to have this debate and if the government denies the people a referendum on the final result of the proposed constitution it, like its predecessors, will find that Europe could be its downfall.

Diana Wallis is the Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber

No... says Stephen Feaster, of the UK Independence Party

I VOTED to stay in what I thought was the Common Market. Unfortunately I was misled. I don't think I was the only one. We had no idea we were going down a road where we would end up being governed by people who can't be unelected.

We have seen our soldiers liberate Iraq so that the Iraqi people can have independence, and the right to determine their future. Yet we are losing that same right. If we don't agree with something imposed on us by Europe, we cannot change it unless we get the agreement of all the other countries.

British politicians have long promised to reform the common agricultural and fisheries policies. But France will never change unless it gets more handouts for its farmers, and the same is true of the Spanish and their fishermen.

These problems will worsen under the changes to the European Union constitution, much of which was outlined in the Maastricht Treaty.

The reforms give the EU the powers to set the agenda, then enact it.

This treaty would bring in a public prosecutor, a legal system which is alien to our own where a person is innocent until proven guilty.

To try to pretend the EU won't be a federal state, when it will have its own foreign minister and defence policy, is ludicrous. And we are giving away control of immigration, which is very emotive.

They try to make out lots of our business depends on Europe. But Britain has always been a trading nation. Most of our trade is domestic, and of our exports, about half go to non-EU nations.

Anyway, the EU countries sell more to us than we sell to them: there's no way they would stop trading with us if we were out of Europe.

I am sure the new EU members are being bribed and blackmailed into joining. Countries like Poland left the Soviet bloc and gained their freedom. Then they were offered handouts to encourage them to give up that independence and join the EU. At the same time they were told if they didn't join they wouldn't be able to trade with the EU.

I don't think they realise what their future holds.

In Britain, John Prescott is organising referendums on whether we want regional government, which will break up the country. Europe is being split into regions to undermine national governments. It's a socialist agenda where you control everything from the centre, in this case Brussels.

I fear there will be a backlash eventually, when people realise the true agenda.

Of course there should be a referendum on the new constitution. There are more than 20 million adults in Britain who weren't eligible to vote in the last referendum.

And of those that were, I am sure the majority who voted for the Common Market would never have supported a federal European Union state.

Stephen Feaster is chairman of the Ryedale branch of the UK Independence Party

Updated: 10:36 Thursday, May 29, 2003