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		Letter to the Editor Leicester Mercury - Wednesday, 30th August 2006 Dear Sir, Peter Valentine's letter (Aug 28th) is the usual travesty of misrepresentation and down-right lies. He claims that the EU has "kept the peace" for Europe's "peace-loving peoples". What nonsense. For the whole of my lifetime (I was born at the end of the Second World war) the peace has been kept by NATO, by the transatlantic alliance, by nuclear deterrence, by 100,000 GIs in Germany. The Berlin wall was brought down, the USSR dismantled, not by the European Commission, but by the courageous and steadfast alliance between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Then Valentine says that the EU is democratic. This is the EU where the peoples of two of the founding member-states voted in referendums against the Constitution, yet Brussels is determined to press ahead with it, and is pressing ahead. The EU's contempt for public opinion is breathtaking. He says the EU is "a union of sovereign states". But if we're sovereign, how come that 60% of our new laws are imposed by foreign institutions where we have no control and little influence? He says the EU is not federalist. Yet right now this week it is taking over more powers in the area of Home Affairs -- and they are called Home Affairs because they are fundamentally internal questions for nation-states. To deny the plain fact that the EU is taking on all the characteristics of a sovereign nation is to live in cloud cuckoo land. In some respects the EU is already more a unitary state than the USA. Britain needs to wake up, unless we want to be a remote off-shore province in a country called Europe. Yours faithfully, Roger Helmer MEP