FOR years I have watched with interest the development of the institutions and policies of the European Union.

From the much-criticised Common Agricultural Policy, its fishing and energy regulations, a common trade policy (i.e. the single market) and with centrally planned industrial and agricultural capacity we have seen the structures grow.

Committees of the regions, so recently overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum in the North East of England, remain in (unrelated) place enabling the bypassing of our national Parliament.

We have the Social Chapter and the most ambitious project this far, the single currency.

It is controlled by a central bank in Frankfurt, ironically in the former HQ of IG Farben, the manufacturers of the Nazis' death gas Zyclon B.

The only problem I have, however, is this isn't Europe in 2005 that I have described.

This was all written in 1942 in a report prepared by the Reich's economics minister, Herr Funk, a leading light in the German National Socialist Party (Nazis) under Adolf Hitler. The structures of the EU have their origin not in modern democratic Europe but in the blueprint for Europe outlined by Hitler's Nazi regime.

Then, as now, the only barrier to a United States of Europe were the national identities and loyalties of its peoples.

That, in part, is why I continue to be proud to be English and British.

We won the war but, I regret to say, unless we wake up we are losing the peace.

Eric Wood,

Oakdale Road,

Clifton Moor,

York.

Updated: 09:44 Tuesday, April 05, 2005