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		Letter to the Editor Nottingham Evening Post - Tuesday 20th January 2004 Dear Sir, Mr. Gretton (letters, 17/1) really ought to get his facts right before he commits pen to paper. He tells us that "the supremacy of EU law" provided for in the EU Constitution has "always been the case in the EU from its earliest days". Just plain wrong, Mr. Gretton. For example, the German Constitutional Court ruled more than once that German law, and the German Constitution, were supreme, and that EU law had to be consistent with German law. The position for the last thirty years has been, at best, ambiguous. The Constitution therefore is a real change, since it explicitly establishes the supremacy of EU law. Then Mr. Gretton gets into a hopeless tangle over the difference between laws and treaties. Can we ignore treaties, he asks. But you can have perfectly good treaties without accepting the supremacy of foreign law. All sorts of countries - the USA, Japan, Switzerland - are bound by treaties, which they generally observe. But they are independent nations with their own laws. The question is very simple. Do we want to be subject to our own laws, passed by British politicians that we can dismiss in a General Election if we want to? Or do we want to be subject to laws made in unaccountable foreign institutions where we have no control and little influence? That is the fundamental question posed by the EU Constitution, and no amount of smoke and mirrors from Mr. Gretton will make it go away. Yours faithfully, Roger Helmer MEP