An exchange of views - Yorkshire Evening Post

The following carefully argued letter appeared on the web pages of The Yorkshire Evening Post this afternoon: CENTRAL to the argument of anti-EU correspondents such as Messrs Farrar, Bower and Woodhead is the idea that the European Union is fundamentally undemocratic and that in a desire to accumulate more power the EU rides roughshod over the interests of nation states. While such assertions sound alarming they are inaccurate, vacuous and harmful to our interests. The truth is that the EU does what its member states allow it to do. No 'eurocrat', however much despised or maligned by the anti-EU brigade, can act in any area unless the member states by binding treaty have agreed that they can. There is a debate to be had about what power should lie where but 'Brussels' can only act where it has been assigned competence. Hence the Lisbon Treaty was negotiated by the democratically elected leaders of the 27 member states. There was no list of key demands for handover of power dreamed up by 'Brussels' and indeed the new treaty does not hand over even ONE new power to the exclusive competence of the Commission. It is true that in Lisbon leaders like Brown, Sarkozy and Merkel have agreed that they can – if all agree – move from unanimity to qualified majority voting in new areas but that isn't the decision of Brussels bureaucrats. The European Commission may be appointed but this doesn't make it necessarily undemocratic. Hillary Clinton has recently been appointed and not elected to a leading role but no one questions the legitimacy of this given that the appointment has been made by her newly-elected president. It is the same with the Chief Exectuve of Leeds City Council, not elected but appointed by our elected councillors. Why should it be different with European appointments? There is an argument for direct election rather than appointment of the future EU president. This would take the Union into unchartered territory and would likely be opposed as usurping the authority of the nation states by the very people who now clamour for more democracy. At a time when a resurgent Russia is making its presence felt our national interest is best served by being a leading member of a united Europe which needs to function as the key ally of the exciting new US administration. The real agenda of the likes of Farrar, Bower, Woodhead, Hanson and Abbott is not to nurture democracy but to lead us out of the EU into some utopian parallel universe in which we would be blissfully untouched by world problems, figuratively towing our island away in to the ocean. The paradox of this is that the Lisbon Treaty that they deride gives them just the mechanism they would need to do this so in an amicable way so they should be supporting it. Mrs Suzie Hughes, Rodley I felt obliged to reply to such dangerous and complacent nonsense as follows:

Although I have not seen the comments of the people Mrs Hughes names, having come across her letter as a result of an internet alert on the Lisbon Treaty, I fear she is dangerously mistaken. National Sovereignty is not divisible. The objective of the powers behind the EU, achieved by the process of the various Treaties ratified to date, has up to now been to be to spread confusion as to where Sovereignty presently lies. After the Lisbon Treaty the EU will become empowered to enter into its own binding Treaties and obligations. National Parliaments will be effectively neutered. The Lisbon Treaty, therefore, transfers 100 per cent of each nation's sovereignty to the EU! The withdrawal procedures in Lisbon are so onerous that even presently viable former sovereign states will be unable to meet the costs, which is quite clearly for me the intent. Given the EU's track record on its progress to date and its obvious internal corruption, can any be sufficiently trusting to give it the benefit of the doubt on interpretation of a deliberately misleading document? For Britain, which has already been stripped practically bare by the EU due to the incompetence of all UK Governments since Thatcher,there will be no prospect of ever being able to afford the required exit fees partly due to the massive national indebtedness incurred by Blair and Brown. The real agenda of the EU is totalitarian domination of the Continent and possibly beyond, why else would it be prepared to destroy the democracy of 27 once sovereign states? Martin Cole

The link to the exchange is here.