John Major

John Major’s triumphant declaration after signing the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was the cricket and tennis loving Prime Minister's equivalent of Chamberlain's 'peace in our time.'

Others thought differently and were nearer the mark. The former French Foreign Minister and member of the European Commission Claud Cheysson mocked that 'the Europe of Maastricht could only have been created in the absence of democracy.'

Major was out of his depth. He had promised to stop the federalist tide, and yet he signed a treaty which turned it in to a flood.

Maastricht, he said, would mean an end to the 'further surrender of British sovereignty'. He was wrong. Perhaps, like his Europhile Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, the Prime Minister had not read the document.

If he had, he would have noticed that:

• for the first time British subjects became 'citizens of the Union….[enjoying] the rights conferred by the Treaty and…subject to the duties imposed thereby'.
• What these duties are was never specified.

It had taken twenty years to move from the Common Market through the European Economic Community and European Community to become the more fully-fledged federal state or Union that had been planned all along, but been kept hidden from the British people.

Maastricht also gave the European Court of Justice the authority to overrule the verdicts of the British courts and strengthened, yet again, the power of the EU over domestic lawmaking.

The treaty even talked of the 'eventual framing of a common defence policy' which might, in time, lead to the creation of a European army.

Most significantly, the Maastricht treaty also established the Committee of the Regions which was to supervise the break up the UK into twelve EU regions which increasingly would be governed directly from Brussels.

So, far resisting the 'further surrender of sovereignty', Major allowed a massive shift of power and authority to Brussels, all the while proclaiming the opposite was happening.

Major also foolishly claimed that: 'We have reduced the cost of new regulations almost to nothing' when the opposite was happening.

As former CBI President Sir John Egan said: 'Europe's production of new regulations is actually increasing at an alarming rate. Of the 22,000 pieces of legislation on the EU statute book, about 12,000 have been introduced in the eight years since 1997, compared to 10,000 during the forty years from 1957 to 1997,' former CBI President Sir John Egan.

It was game set and match for the European Union – and an embarrassing double fault for John Major.