The lessons which are to be learnt from a study of the creation of the Constitution of the United States of America are most emphatically not lessons which the actual constructors of the presently intended centralized, pan-European, EU superstate are eager or even willing to learn. Indeed there is every reason to believe that those senior members of the British Conservative Party who assured its leader that they were not federalists were actually speaking the truth. For had not former Chancellor Kohl himself insisted that the aim was to produce not a federation of European nation states but instead "one country: Europe."?

     The united states which established the United States of America were of course the thirteen revolted British colonies. All of them had been recognized as independent sovereign states under the peace treaty which ratified their victory in their War of Independence. The prefatory paragraph of the Constitution of the United States of America reads:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

     The first thing to emphasize here is that this was intended to be the constitution of a union of fully sovereign states in which the central government would have all but only the minimum powers needed to achieve certain limited but essential purposes.

     It was, that is to say, intended to produce a government which would establish and maintain internal law and order, which would establish and maintain an army and navy for defence against external dangers, and which would also introduce some unspecified measures to promote the general welfare. That emphasis here upon the word 'general' is essential. For whenever throughout the nineteenth century it was proposed that the Congress should authorize a charitable gift of taxpayers' money to some particularly deserving cause the likes of Congressman David Crockett would ask to be directed to the Clause in the Constitution which licensed the Congress to authorize such donations. The direction thus requested was, of course, never received.

     The last thing which the drafters of the future Constitution of the future United States of Europe are going to produce is a constitution for the limited central government of a union of generally self-governing states. On the contrary, they have from the beginning to take as given — as most of them are apparently only too delighted to do — the entire acquis communnaitaire. This is an already enormous but apparently still substantially growing system of many tens of thousands of pages of unamendable and unrepealable laws and regulations intruding into and restricting almost if not quite every sphere of human life.

     In being intended to produce a system of imperatively necessary but strictly limited government the Constitution of the United States of America was itself designed, as its prefatory paragraph states, "to secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." To appreciate exactly what the framers of that Constitution had in mind in speaking of the Blessing of Liberty we have to go back to their Declaration of Independence. The crucial sentences were:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that when any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundations on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

     It is important here to realize that the "young Mr Jefferson" (the future President Jefferson), who was given the job of drafting the Declaration of Independence thanks to his famously possessing "a peculiar felicity of expression", also possessed another and much more important qualification for performing that task. This was that he had studied and learnt from, above all, the second of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 'An Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government.'

     That volume was first published in 1690, almost a century before the adoption of the US Constitution. Although appearing first only after the Glorious Revolution, which established a new British constitutional settlement under the Dutch born Protestant King William, it was largely written earlier and in a period in which Locke himself was involved in assisting his patient and patron the first Earl of Shaftesbury in the struggles which eventually achieved that new constitutional settlement for the British Isles. It was this fortunate constitutional settlement which made possible the subsequent explosion of British wealth and power without which Britain could not have played in later centuries the part which it did play in frustrating earlier attempts first by France alone and later by Germany alone, to dominate the entire European continent by force of arms. And it was the equally Lockean constitution of the USA which made possible that explosion of American wealth and power which enabled the USA to come to the aid of Europe in the three great wars of the twentieth century.

     In his Second Treatise of Civil Government Locke argued that the rights of man, which were nearly a century later to be proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence, are derived from the essential nature of human beings as such. He then proceeded, having disposed in his First Treatise of the Divine Right of Kings, to derive from the same premises the conclusion that government is legitimized only by the consent of the governed.

     The first and crucially important distinction which is needed here is that between welfare rights and option rights. The rights of the Declaration of Independence were all option rights, rights to make your own choices between the various options which were from time to time open to you, providing always that your choices do not violate the corresponding rights of other people.

     Thus that Declaration did not proclaim rights to health, education and welfare — and whatever else might be thought necessary to the achievement of happiness — but rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it being up to every individual human being whether he or she chooses to pursue (and to the gods whether, if so, they capture) that prey.

     Welfare rights, however, such as most of the rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, are rights to the provision of some perceived good, presumably by the state and hence necessarily at the expense of persons other than the entitled beneficiaries. Thus from Article 25 of that Declaration we learn that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself and of his family . . . and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

     Although it is doubtful whether many of the governments of the world's long established democratic states have been directly influenced by this particular Universal Declaration they all — including of course both the United States of today and all the fifteen present members of the EU — recognize a greater or lesser abundance of such welfare entitlements — entitlements provided by the state at the expense of its taxpayers.

     Whatever may be said for or against state action to realize such welfare rights it is obvious that such action cannot but require further taxation and thus reduce the freedom of individual citizens to spend their money as they themselves would have chosen to spend it.

     This reduction of individual freedom consequent upon the realization by the state of such welfare rights as are listed in the UN Declaration will necessarily be substantially increased by the realization of any of the new kind of welfare rights proclaimed in the European Declaration of Human Rights. For that Declaration proclaims rights to be defended (by the state) against hostile discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, racial set membership, and so on. (By Cantor's Axiom for Sets the sole essential feature of a set, is that its members have at least one common characteristic, any kind of characteristic.)

     However wrong such hostile discrimination may be, its criminalization necessarily constitutes a state imposed limitation on the freedoms of the citizen. And if a state establishes an organization to combat any form of hostile discrimination then the costs to the citizens of that establishment will surely at least never diminish. For state employees are no more disposed than the rest of us to work themselves out of their employments, and will certainly contrive to continue to find hostile discrimination where it is not, by demanding that formerly disfavoured minorities should be represented in every honourable occupation in at least the same proportion as in the population as a whole. Such state activities reduce the liberties and increase the costs of all the employers affected by them.

     The US Constitution contains no clause clearly conceding a right of secession to any of the constituent states. But that unstated right was surely in the statement in the Declaration of Independence that "when any Form of Government becomes destructive . . . it is the right of the People to alter or abolish its and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its powers in such Form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

     The most authoritative evidence of the actual intention of those who drafted and adopted the US Constitution is, however, to be found in a statement by James Madison, usually considered the father of the Constitution. He thought that its meaning was to be sought "not in the opinions or intentions of the body which planned and proposed it, but in those of the state conventions where it received all the authority which it possesses (emphasis added).

     That all this has lessons for the makers or would be makers of the Constitution for the EU superstate presently in course of construction could not be clearer, or to them less welcome. For the makers of the US Constitution were making a constitution for a federation of thirteen sovereign states, but of thirteen sovereign states whose populations all spoke the same language who (or whose ancestors) had all (or almost all) immigrated from the same country and therefore all (or almost all) shared the same cultural traditions.

     The first and most important lesson to be drawn here from a study of the Constitution of the United States of America as it was at its beginning is that, if you have got to have an 'United States of Europe', then it needs to have a Constitution under which the individual formerly fully sovereign member states retain, or as the case may be regain, as many as possible of the full powers of sovereign self-government.

     There are two main reasons for this. The first is that an universally recognized right of secession would effectively prevent the central government from imposing taxes or other burdens which would have a grossly unfair impact upon the populations of particular member states. What made majorities of so many of the Southern states of the USA want to secede in 1861 after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President was not any sort of threat from him or his Republican party to the all too slowly declining institution of slavery but three closely connected facts of political economy.

     I will say no more on this platform either about Lincoln and the war between the states or about the exploitation of my own nation by the Franco-German motor which drives the whole EU project. But I am keen to discuss either or both subjects informally afterwards.

     The second main reason for leaving or restoring to all the present and future member states of the EU the maximum number of the powers of a fully sovereign independent state is that this would vastly increase the possibility of political and economic experiment and innovations. And when any of these innovations proved successful in one state, then it would surely be imitated by other states.

     The powers of the central government of the USA today are vastly greater than they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But Oregon recently legalized voluntary euthanasia on certain strict conditions while an experimental education voucher scheme was introduced in Madison, Wisconsin.

     What, however, is of most interest to us is legislation introduced into the Congress a few years ago by Republicans, but supported by then President Clinton against ferocious opposition from very far from classically 'liberal' Democrats, to encourage states to experiment to find ways of reducing the total cost to taxpayers of welfare entitlements. This is and can only be done by finding ways of reducing the total number of person days of entitlement to such welfare provision. That in turn can only be done fairly and properly by finding ways of inducing individuals to do whatever they can: both to avoid becoming entitled to such provision in the first place; and, if and when they have nevertheless become entitled, to do whatever they can to become as soon as possible gainfully employed and thereby to cease to be entitled to such state welfare provision.

     There is already some tax competition between the states of the USA. The eleven states which do not, like the other thirty nine, add a few percentage points for themselves on to the federal income tax rate appear in consequence of this lower taxation to attract some measure of incoming working population and incoming investment. But the idea of tax competition is abhorrent to the EU Commission in Brussels. It is instead constantly urging the UK Chancellor to 'harmonize' our income and other taxes up to Franco-German levels.

     This insistence upon the unacceptability of tax competition and upon the need instead to harmonize upwards, along with the even more emphatic insistence upon the unamendable and unrepealable status of the enormous acquis communnaitaire, will surely ensure that the Constitution about to be imposed upon the member states will render entirely impossible the flexibility and innovation which might perhaps give the EU some very slight outside chance of fulfilling its stated ambition of becoming by 2010 the most competitive economy in the world.

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Every year the World Economic Forum issues its Global Competitiveness Report with its country rankings. Competitiveness is assessed as a composite index of eight factors: Openness, Government, Finance, Infrastructure, Technology, Management, Labour and Institutions. Each factor is calculated from both quantitative and survey data, assigned a weighting and assembled into the final Competitiveness Index.

     The data on which each year's report is based are those collected in the year previous to that of the report itself. In the 1998 Report, based on data for 1997, the year in which the first Blair administration was elected with a firm commitment to implement the competitiveness diminishing EU Social Chapter the UK was rated fourth in the whole world. By 1999 the UK had already dropped to the eighth place. Of those eight five were English speaking countries: the USA and British Commonwealth and former Commonwealth members (that one being Hong Kong). The 1999 rankings of the four 'core' EU countries, with the economies of which that of the UK is required to converge were as follows (with the rankings for the previous year in brackets: France 23 (22), Germany 25 (24), Spain 26 (25) and Italy 35 (41).