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  I think it is a bit late for the Conservatives to be eurosceptic now. In fact, I think it is a darn cheek. It was Edward Heath who signed us up to be members of the European community (and cheerfully gave away our fishing grounds).
  
  The privatisation policies of the Thatcher years have now firmly cemented us into Europe. Most of our utilities such as water and electricity are now owned by the French. We are going to be at the back of the queue for new nuclear power stations in the forthcoming energy shortage as we no longer own our own or have the ability to manufacture them.
  
  The French are almost entirely nuclear and their own requirements will come first. We are going to have to be very nice to them. In the meantime, we shall continue to erect vast numbers of extremely expensive and almost completely useless wind turbines in a fatuous gesture towards climate change amelioration to meet obligations imposed by the very same EU.
  
  Our transportation links are now very much foreign owned. The privatisation of British Rail by John Major saw to that. Great swathes of the British rail network are now owned by the French and German nationalised railways. SNCF owns a substantial part of Eurostar and of Southeastern. Deutsche Bahn runs most of the freight on British railways, having purchased EWS from Wisconsin Central. DB also owns Chiltern Railways and is shortly expected to purchase the British arm of Eurostar.
  
  The Channel Tunnel is now completely French owned. Margaret Thatcher required that it be built with private money. It was a financial disaster and seven billion pounds had to be frittered away leaving a remnant sustainable debt of three billion to be administered by Groupe Eurotunnel.
  
  The Channel Tunnel Rail Link was also a financial disaster, again as a requirement of being built with private money to be paid for by the receipts from an anticipated 21 million Eurostar passengers a year, which never happened. It was only completed after John Prescott guaranteed that the government would step in and pick up the bill when it all went belly up, which is what happened as predicted.
  
  British railway manufacturing capacity was decimated by the lamentable Railtrack organisation formed by John Major to run the BR infrastructure, subsequently taken back into public ownership under Network Rail, now in debt to the tune of 25 billion pounds. Remnant manufacturing is largely owned by Bombardier with all freight locomotives being built in Canada and Spain. We are no longer able to design even such a relatively simple beast as the high speed train for HS1 and have had to send nearly a billion pounds to Japan for them to do it for us.
  
  The airports are owned by the Spanish. Most of the seaports are owned by a consortium including Singapore and North America.
  
  It is much, much too late to profess to be eurosceptic. Harold Macmillan warned that we were selling off the family silver decades ago and so it has come to pass. Edward Heath's vision was of a united Europe basically to bind all Europeans into a political and economic entity to stop the Germans from plunging us into yet another war, after two wars in one century had left the entire continent utterly devastated not once but twice.
  
  Any idea that this was just an essay in economic cooperation without the ultimate intention being that of full political integration is remarkably ingenuous. Does anybody seriously think that in a hundred year's time all the little countries of Europe will still be doing their own thing?

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