The results of this consultation were that representatives of Business for Sterling and New Europe were against the motion, two organisations were against the motion being put but were in favour of an agreement between the Congress and the "No" campaign, and 14 organisations were in favour of the motion.

I was asked to negotiate with Business for Sterling and the "No" campaign with the aim of trying to form a joint campaign. It has not been possible to reach an agreement on this. The position is that the Congress does not at present have the resources to set up a campaign of its own.

What the Congress does is to provide a meeting point for those who are anxious about developments in Europe. Past meetings of the Congress have resolved to unite against the euro and have also passed the Declaration for Democracy, which included the following resolutions.

1. The electorate must agree by referendum any further transfer of power to the EU.
   

2. The Common Law of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the ancient legal system of Scotland, trial by jury and habeas corpus are inviolate, and must not be weakened by alien European law and any attempt to do so must be resisted.
   

3. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, or any "European Constitution", will transfer too much power from national parliaments to unaccountable European judges. A European Constitution is unthinkable and the Charter of Fundamental Rights is unacceptable, even in declaratory form.
   

4. National parliaments must be the custodians of their peoples' constitutions, taxation, defence, foreign affairs, jurisprudence, police and electoral policy.
   

5. This will involve the retrieval of powers already granted to the European Union and the rejection of the legal process by which powers are expanded by the European federal institutions and then retained forever.

The issue before this Congress is whether we should continue to meet and, in particular, to crystallise these views and to make known our common anxieties about such matters as the threat to our legal system from the next IGC and the potential destruction of our identity as a nation through the Convention on the Future of Europe.

What I propose is to divide our discussion today into two parts, the first dealing with the euro and any impending campaigning and the second considering the future role of the Congress. To start the process off I am going to call five speakers who represent some of the important organisations making up the Congress:

• Austin Mitchell MP, Congress Co-Chairman,
  and Chair of the Labour Euro Safeguards Campaign

• Russell Walters, Director of the Democracy Movement

• Christopher Gill, Chairman of the Freedom Association

• Lord Stoddart, Chairman of the Campaign for an Independent Britain

• Lord Pearson, Co-Founder of Global Britain

The position of Labour Euro Safeguards is broadly that we did not think it appropriate, certainly not at this time, for the Congress to make an application to be the organisation for the No campaign. We thought there should be a broadly representative organisation which would present a united front. It should not argue about the side issues such as corpus juris, in or out, or about the irritations which have accumulated over the years in our relationship with Europe. All these other things are going to complicate what is a single issue and a simple campaign, yes or no to the euro.

We are attracted to how the Danes ran their successful No campaign, which was that it was won by a loose federation, a broad alliance of groups opposed to the euro. This defined only the broad parameters of the debate so that it was focused on the central issues and what people should not say, what ground they should not wander over into. Each organisation put its case essentially to its own members and its own supporters but also tried to appeal to the wider community. There was not therefore a cacophony; there was abroad common ground for the discussion.

We were therefore opposed to a Congress application at this time. As for an application by Business for Sterling, Michael Spicer and I went to see Business for Sterling and, it is fair to say, were not able to move them. I do not think their position of "Europe Yes, Euro No" is going to be broadly representative of the organisations and groups opposed to the euro. They replied that their money had been raised – and they said they had the money and 70,000 committed supporters – on the grounds that this was an acceptable common formula which would not scare off business contributors. So they wanted to campaign on "Europe Yes, Euro No", which we were not very happy with. Those discussions did not get very far.

LESC would like discussion to continue to establish the umbrella. We do not think that Business for Sterling has the political nous, experience and the feet on the ground or on the pavement that other organisations can provide. We want a broader common ground than Business for Sterling is prepared to take.

This issue will be decided by the Electoral Commission. It has to choose the body most broadly representative of the groups opposed to the euro which will organise the campaign. But the worst case scenario would be a prolonged fight about which body that should be and a public row in which we divide ourselves and struggle for pre-eminence. We want therefore quiet consultations to go on and we do not want to be sidetracked into an in or out of Europe argument which is going to be divisive. They will try and shift the ground onto that, as Peter Hain did last week by saying that enemies of the euro are enemies of Europe. This was a monstrous thing to say.

We don’t want to confuse the electorate with that, but we want to tell the electorate single-mindedly and with a single voice that the euro will be bad for Britain; that it locks us into an irreversible process of ever closer union which we could not then resist; that this would mean we could not say what I would like to say and I think my campaign would like to say, "thus far and no further"; and that it removes from the control of the British government the ability to manage the British economy for the benefit of the people. Those are the basic arguments and that is the argument we have to put.

In conclusion, this is not going to be easy. It is going to be an uphill struggle because huge forces of propaganda and the huge resources of money in Europe are going to be unleashed against us. They are going to try to create the impression that the 1975 campaign created: that all the sound, sensible folk are on one side and all the dangerous, divided odd and angular people – that’s me, roughly – are on the other. They will try to create that impression to put off the electorate. So it is not going to be easy to fight this powerfully, effectively and in a united front, but on that basis I think we can win.

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The Democracy Movement wants to suggest that in our EU-critical movement as a whole, as we face the next thirty months, we need to craft our approach in response to two basic realities.

The first reality we believe we have to confront is that if there is a referendum next year it will only be about the single currency. We are not being given a chance to vote on whether or not we want to leave the EU. It will be a vote between the pound or full economic and monetary union. Once the government announces there will be a referendum, the Democracy Movement believes that we all collectively as a movement must be disciplined for that six months and work in a single-minded way to prevent a yes vote. If we try to combine the cause of the pound with the goal of leaving the EU, make no mistake: we will lose and we will lose big.

Linking the two positions of keeping the pound and getting out of the EU will for a start fragment our support in the country. It will alienate groups and voters who, although pro-pound at this stage, also want, perhaps naively, Britain to stay in the EU. Among the electorate these people are the overwhelming majority, whether we like it or not. It is a reality that some on our side have yet to face up to.

Opinion polls show that support for leaving the EU has actually halved from 24% to 12% in the last three years and while support for the pound is strong at 60% (recovered from December and January) against 27% for the euro, only 30% and 10% are absolutely committed to either side. This means that in a referendum campaign 60% of the electorate will be persuadable either way, and 43% of that 60% are currently showing up as two-thirds of our supporters.

The fact is that we could easily blow a referendum and there is absolutely no room for complacency. We need every vote, because just winning is not good enough as we know from Denmark and Ireland. We have to crush the euro and kick it out of sight. 5% or 10% will not do it, we will not even be safe with 15%; we need a whopping 20% or 25% margin or we will have another referendum on our plates five or ten years later.

We have to bury it and to do that we cannot alienate a single vote by tying our cause to others that are less popular, be they that of the UKIP, that of the Conservative Party or that of the Countryside Alliance. This is not to say that up until the moment Blair announces the referendum we cannot continue to alert the British people about other issues, such as the threat to our environment or legal system, and of course the 2004 Treaty that I will come on to in a moment. But once the starting pistol is fired, we should all be totally committed to the one objective that we can in reality achieve: saving the pound. It is not a fight that will be led by this Congress but it is one that we must all support unconditionally. Paris was worth a mass and Britain is worth a "Europe Yes" for six months or so.

The second reality we believe we have to face is that as of last Wednesday yet another life-threatening challenge faces the country: the Convention charged with drawing up the 2004 Treaty has held its first meeting. For the EU this is intended to be the mother of all treaties, to complete the work of creating a superstate. Jack Straw in his recent speech said that Britain should surrender control over home affairs, thus opening the door to corpus juris and directives on sentencing policy, and indeed what is and is not a crime. And that is the government’s opening bid in the negotiation.

We must do everything we can to oppose this Treaty. One way to inhibit Blair from handing over yet more vital powers will be to beat him in a euro referendum. If he wins he will feel free to surrender all of what little remains. Berlin is already demanding we hand over control of income tax. Chancellor Schröder says it is vital for the single currency to work, and of course he is right, as Peter Hain pointed out in his attack on the euro in his book Eyes to the Left. If Blair wins the referendum, I can see him signing us up for taxation without representation.

But of course he may not oblige us by holding a referendum before then. The other way to oppose the 2004 Treaty is to create merry hell about it the whole time, starting now. Perhaps the object would be to force Blair to concede a referendum on this treaty, in line with previous declarations of this Congress. Here is a role for the Congress for Democracy which is separate from and parallel to the single currency issue.

If we choose we can turn this convivial meeting place into a campaign to mobilise against the 2004 Treaty. We will have far more time and many more opportunities to highlight the sinister implications of this next betrayal than we did concerning Nice. United, the Congress can monitor and expose the deliberations of the Convention, we can harass Peter Hain, our chief representative on this body. Hain and the government will be caught on the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, they want to ingratiate themselves with the centralising current within the EU, on the other hand they want to downplay the significance of the proceedings to the British people just as they did with Nice. Together we can make this contradiction impossible for them and help finally to draw the veil from the eyes of the British people.

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Could I first of all say that the Freedom Association is almost unique in being a political pressure group which is not a single issue pressure group and that means that we have a rather different perspective to many other groups represented here today. Because we are not a single issue pressure group we have a legitimate interest wherever freedom is threatened and in the context of the contemporary political scene, the most important freedom that we have to defend is political freedom because, quite frankly, if we no longer have political freedom then all talk of other freedoms is purely academic. And we have concluded that political freedom is quite incompatible with European integration and TFA has therefore concluded that the best thing that the United Kingdom could do would be to leave the European Union altogether. That is not to say, in fact far from it, that we will not support a campaign against the imposition of the euro, but I would simply urge all delegates here today to try to avoid falling into the trap of using the language of the integrationists, which is to talk about the euro as opposed to what it really is, the implementation of economic and monetary union. Of course it follows that if you adopt the single currency, therefore economic and monetary union, you are almost inevitably bound to accept the political union that therefore follows. And that is why we have some reservations about the slogan that the "No" campaign are promoting which says "Europe Yes, Euro No". As our Co-Chairman, Austin Mitchell, said a moment or two ago, that is not a broadly representative slogan and indeed many of us would question the intellectual coherence of that slogan. We would have preferred a much more significant coming together of all the groups involved in this argument. I am quite sure that the Freedom Association would have been prepared, and is still prepared, to sing very small about its wish to leave the EU in the context of a debate about the single currency and the referendum. It would have been nice, I think, if those on the other side of this consideration had been prepared also to sing small on the question of Europe Yes, so that we could all be absolutely as one in opposing the single currency. I accept what Russell Walters has just said, that for the next six months or however long it takes, we must all come together and act as one, but my concern is that whilst there is no certainty that there will be a referendum on the single currency, what is certain is that there will be another Inter-Governmental Conference in 2004 and the question we all have to ask ourselves is after that IGC in 2004 what will actually remain of our freedoms and of our democracy in this country. And I would like to suggest to this Congress that part of the tactic of the integrationists is to get us all concentrating on the single currency issue and losing sight of the bigger picture because the bigger picture undoubtedly is this headlong drive towards European integration and I and my Association are totally opposed to that.

It is often suggested to me that the myriad of small organisations who are interested in this subject should all come together and form one bigger group and I checked the rationale. There is some logic in that, one can see that if one had one big group it is possible perhaps to organise better, to fund raise better, and so on. But I think that that would be a huge mistake, for the following reason. We are outnumbered and outflanked on this issue of Europe and our only hope is to remain in our smaller groupings, acting as guerrilla bands and because we are all small, because we are all driven by a few enthusiasts, I believe that we will have always by that means the element of surprise. Our enemies do not know where each group is going to be tomorrow morning even. We do not even know ourselves where we are going to be tomorrow morning and that must worry the enemy. But if we were all to come together and agree to merge and make one big group, then I know that our enemies would very soon work out where we were coming from and they would very quickly learn how to neutralise us. In fact, my experience tells me that just about every national organisation in this country today of any substance has been targeted by the integrationists, has been infiltrated by the integrationists and has been neutered by the integrationists.

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Like LESC the Campaign for an Independent Britain did not support a resolution being put to the Congress that they should apply to be the lead organisation in the referendum but what they did say was that there should be discussions with the "No" campaign to see whether we could reach agreement on having one umbrella organisation of which we could all be members. It seems that that approach has been rejected and I think that that is altogether unfortunate.

My views have not changed since last July: that is, that the whole of the eurorealist movement must be involved in any referendum campaign to save the pound. The campaign should not be monopolised by an elite group of businessmen and senior former politicians, all of whom have played a part – either positively or by neglect – in bringing Britain to its present position where our currency and our very future as an independent nation are at stake. These same people, through the "No" campaign, seek to become the main player in the umbrella organisation and will seek to monopolise the decisions as to who should and should not be excluded from taking a leading part. That is unacceptable. It is unacceptable, I imagine, to every other organisation other than the "No" campaign.

Now I have to say and make absolutely clear, that as far as I know, no organisation – certainly not the CIB and certainly not the Anti-Maastricht Alliance– is planning to use the referendum on the currency as a platform for getting Britain out. Every organisation, as far as I know, including CIB, has said that they are prepared to concentrate on the issue of saving the pound. For the "No" campaign to suggest that there are others who are extremists who are not prepared to rally around that campaign to save the pound is completely and utterly wrong. But having said that, I have to agree with other speakers that it will prove to be quite impossible during the campaign to save the pound to eliminate other issues being raised, not necessarily by ourselves but by other people, and we have to be ready to meet those discussions and deal with them.

In any event, a new threat is looming on the horizon – a written constitution and a European government which Giscard d’Estaing wants to be decided by a Europe-wide referendum in 2004, and he wants the referendum to take place at the same time as the European parliamentary elections. Now Blair and company may well throw in a referendum on the euro at the same time and where would that leave a campaign fighting solely on the economic tests?

So we have to look forward a bit and try to examine the mind of the government, who seem to be seeking either to confuse themselves or to confuse other people at the present time. There is need for unity, a great need for unity around our cause, but not on terms dictated by one organisation, and we should continue to press for equal status in any umbrella organisation. And again, like LESC, and I am sure practically everybody in this room, we still believe that the "No" campaign should come on board with the rest of us and I am in favour of discussions taking place again and continuing for as long as necessary.

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I would like to say that I have always been amongst those who felt that a referendum would probably never take place. I am a bit more worried about it now. It seems there is a serious possibility that Blair has done a deal about taking over as President of Europe after 2004 and Brown will change his mind on the currency in order to win a referendum and become Prime Minister. I think there is more of a possibility than I did before.

One or two points just to underline what has been said already, and I hope my credentials as a come-outer are accepted. We come-outers are going to vote No anyway. That must be obvious, but it is worth remembering. And so the official campaign, whatever it is, is really going to have to reach as far as possible to those who think they like the European Union but who can be persuaded to vote No. The "No" campaign, which at the moment is Business for Sterling and David Owen’s New Europe, says it really believes it knows what No. 10’s strategy is, and that is to make the "No" campaign look like a front for come-outery. They give the example of the Scottish referendum and say that the Scottish people would not have voted for a Scottish parliament if they had believed that really it was a vote for complete independence. I am not supporting what they say, I am just telling you that I know that is what they think and that is Downing Street’s strategy. They think that if the "No" campaign looks like a front for come-outery then the people will be so frightened that the Yes campaign could win. We may not agree with that, and I think most people in this room probably do not, but we must remember we will be up against the government machine, millions of pounds from the European Union, and they could change what we believe is the present sentiment among people, which may be soft. They will, of course, try to confine the campaign to the euro, they will not want to go into the constitutional arguments. The BBC of course will support them in that. So at the moment will the Conservative Party and maybe others. I don’t know whether they will succeed in that. My belief is that they will not. I think the constitutional issue will explode during any campaign.

So I believe that the elements of this Congress which are not committed publicly to come-outery should probably join up with Business for Sterling and New Europe – they can speak for themselves, but I would have thought the Conservative Party, the Greens, the Democracy Movement and LESC, who have already spoken, and perhaps the IoD, and there may be others. I think all those who are not "tainted", like some of us, by come-outery should get into the main campaign. And I do believe, I am afraid, that the reality is that Business for Sterling is the best place to organise this campaign. I think it is probably better organised than any other conglomeration of us here, especially if we are "tainted" with come-outery.

I think they may well have some tidying up to do in that regard. I think some of them may have said things, or fought elections in the past which might compromise that, but I think their strategy is right and I think that we come-outers should do what we can to support them and to support them in getting the official money to fight this campaign.

I think our line – and I think this is a dilemma – is whether we come-outers want to fight that eventual campaign merely as satellites, keeping our independence and all the rest of it, or whether we want to form ourselves into some body to help the "No" campaign so that the come-outers can come together and take the line of "Yes, some of us do want to go further than just saying no to the currency, we want out of the thing altogether. In fact, some of us think the whole European project is disastrous and dangerous and thoroughly unlikely to bring peace and absolutely irrelevant and dangerous to prosperity", but in this campaign I think our line should be, "We are not talking about that. We are supporting the "No" campaign. Some of us want to go further, but that is not what this is about. We are against the single currency for all the reasons which the "No" campaign will have put forward and which we know off by heart anyway."

So that’s what I think we should do. I think we should support them. God help them if they fail. And as for the Congress, I really think the Congress should go on, but I do think that the Congress should begin to discuss the issues which surround the Convention, as we move towards 2004 and the terrifying prospect of the constitution of the EU and above all the legal personality which is the aim of these europhiles, when of course, the flag, the anthem, the parliament, the executive and the army fall into place. That is their end game and that is what I think this Congress should start to do without compromising the "No" campaign, which I am sure all of us wish very well.

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