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		The false "benefits" of EU membership Lincolnshire Echo - December 4 2003 I recently heard a europhile speaker, who started by nodding in the direction of Conservative policy on Europe. He spoke warmly of a Europe of independent, sovereign nation states, trading and co-operating together. But it is a cruel deception to suggest that the EU as it is meets that definition -- and still less the new EU of the draft Constitution. The Constitution creates, in all but name, a unitary state governed by centralised institutions. EU law will be supreme, and EU "competences" will cover practically all areas of policy, including economic, social and employment policy, asylum and immigration, foreign policy and defence, justice and home affairs, energy, transport and public health. In such a polity, Britain will become little more than an off-shore province, with no control and little influence. But my euro-federalist friend came up with two examples which, he said, illustrated the vital benefits of EU integration: environmental protection, and peace in Europe. These claims are often made, but not often enough subjected to critical analysis. So let's take a look at them. As though it were a stunning revelation, he announced that smoke does not respect national boundaries. Half our air pollution comes from the Continent, he said. Half of what we create goes to the Continent. Therefore environmental policy must be run on a Europe-wide basis from Brussels. QED. This argument is so facile that it cannot withstand a moment's critical analysis. If smoke does not respect national boundaries, neither does it respect the boundaries of the EU. The pollution we pump out in Teesside today may be in Turin tomorrow, but it will be in Taiwan and Tokyo next week. And the coal-fired power stations and wood-burning cooking-stoves of China and India are huge contributors to global CO2 which no EU environment policy can address. In fact many of the problems which the euro-luvvies tell us can no longer be solved by the individual nation-state, are best solved at a global level. And if they need to be solved by groups of nations, why must it always be by the EU? What about regional solutions? Transatlantic solutions? Take the North Sea, which my speaker quoted as a perfect example of the need for an EU policy. Pollution is delivered into the North Sea by both the Thames and the Rhine, he pointed out. But this problem can be readily solved by a specific intergovernmental agreement between states with a North Sea coast -- including Norway, which is in any case not even a member of the EU. There is no need to abandon self-determination and sovereignty, and to establish anti-democratic supranational institutions, in order to solve the problem of North Sea pollution. The environmental case falls apart as soon as you look at it. So does the argument about "peace". It is simply not the case that "Europe" has kept the peace for sixty years. Indeed where the EU has attempted peace-keeping operations it has been conspicuously unsuccessful, and had to call on the assistance of the USA to finish the job. Peace in Europe has been maintained, first and foremost, by NATO, the nuclear deterrent and the transatlantic alliance -- and by tens of thousands of American troops in Germany. It was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who faced down the Soviet Union -- not Brussels. That is why the EU's paper army, and plans to establish independent EU command and control systems outside NATO, will add nothing to Britain's security -- indeed they will undermine it. EU military aspirations are informed by the perverse and pervasive anti-Americanism of EU countries, especially of France. They are based on a sense of rivalry with the US, not on comradeship and shared interests. My greatest fear is that transatlantic competition may escalate, in some future year, to confrontation, with disastrous consequences for both sides. William Hague once asked, perceptively, "What is the problem to which the EU is the solution?". The answer is simple. There is no problem to which the EU is the solution. The problem is the EU itself.