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By Root 2949 0

important signs of the way things were going. That summer I commissioned a paper from officials which spelt out in precise detail how the Commission was pushing forward the frontiers of its ‘competence’ into new areas — culture, education, health and social security. It used a whole range of techniques. It set up ‘advisory committees’ whose membership was neither appointed by, nor answerable to, member states and which tended therefore to reach communautaire decisions. It carefully built up a library of declaratory language, largely drawn from the sort of vacuous nonsense which found its way into Council conclusions, in order to justify subsequent proposals. It used a special budgetary procedure, known as ‘actions ponctuelles’ which enabled it to finance new projects without a legal base for doing so. But, most seriously of all, it consistently misemployed treaty articles requiring only a qualified majority to issue directives which it could not pass under articles which required unanimity.

Often, as over the environment, or later on health and hours of work, it was difficult to explain to the general public precisely why we opposed the specific measure the Commission wanted. When commissioners issued directives outside their competence they were careful to choose popular causes which had support among pressure groups in member countries, thus presenting themselves as the true friends of the British worker, pensioner and environmentalist. This made it politically difficult to resist the creeping expansion of the Commission’s authority. In theory, it would have been possible to fight all this in the courts; for time after time the Commission were twisting the words and intentions of the European Council to its own ends. We did indeed fight, and won a number of cases on these grounds before the European Court of Justice (ECJ). But the advice from the lawyers was that in relation to questions of Community and Commission competence the ECJ would favour ‘dynamic and expansive’ interpretations of the treaty over restrictive ones. The dice were loaded against us.

The more I considered all this, the greater my frustration and the deeper my anger became. Were British democracy, parliamentary sovereignty, the common law, our traditional sense of fairness, our ability to run our own affairs in our own way to be subordinated to the demands of a remote European bureaucracy, resting on very different traditions? I had by now heard about as much of the European ‘ideal’ as I could take; I suspected that many others had too. In the name of this ideal, waste, corruption and abuse of power were reaching levels which no one who supported, as I had done, entry to the European Economic Community could have foreseen. Because Britain was the most stable and developed democracy in Europe we had perhaps most to lose from these developments. But Frenchmen who wanted to see France free to decide her own destiny would be losers too. So would Germans, who wished to retain their own currency, the deutschmark, which they had made the most credible in the world.

I was no less conscious of those millions of eastern Europeans living under communism. How could a tightly centralized, highly regulated, supra-national European Community meet their aspirations and needs? Arguably, it was the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians who were the real — indeed the last — European ‘idealists’; for to them Europe represented a precommunist past, an idea which symbolized the liberal values and national cultures that Marxism had sought unsuccessfully to snuff out.

This wider Europe, stretching perhaps to the Urals and certainly to include that New Europe across the Atlantic, was an entity which made at least historical and cultural sense. And in economic terms, only a truly global approach would do. This then was my thinking as I turned my mind to what would be the ‘Bruges Speech’.

The hall in which I made my speech was oddly arranged. The platform from which I spoke was placed in the middle of the long side so that the audience stretched far to my left and right, with only