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		Letter to the Editor Financial Times - Monday, 24 November 2003 Dear Sir, Kirsty Hughes, seeking to promote the EU's draft Constitution (letters, Nov 20th), offers us a mish-mash of error and confusion. She insists that it is a Constitutional Treaty, not a Constitution. Leaving aside the obvious response that this is a distinction without a difference, she is in any case just plain wrong. I have a copy on my desk as I write. It is described as "Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe". There is indeed a Treaty, but the Treaty is merely a delivery mechanism, and what it is intended to deliver is a Constitution, pure and simple. She is right that the draft includes much that was in earlier treaties, and to the extent that it alerts us to some of the transfers of power to Brussels previously achieved by stealth, it may be helpful. But it also transfers huge new policy areas to Brussels. For example, it appears to hand over control of our North Sea oil and gas, just as the Treaty of Rome handed over our North Sea Fisheries. Perhaps worst of all, the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights takes huge areas of policy out of any democratic oversight whatever, and passes them to unaccountable foreign judges whom we did not elect and cannot remove. If the government ratifies this dreadful document without a referendum, the Constitution will have no legitimacy whatsoever. Yours faithfully, Roger Helmer MEP