“At the very moment the eastern bloc disintegrated, the EEC mooted a major step in the opposite direction. The commission’s head, Jacques Delors, proposed in 1990 that the EEC become an executive agent of the European Parliament, with the currently sovereign Council of Ministers as merely its senate. This would drastically increase the unelected commission’s authority and diminish national sovereignty. It was constitutionally–not to mention politically–explosive. The EU was becoming a state without a nation. Britain’s Thatcher reacted in the House of Commons, ‘No, no, no!’ She later added, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ The Delors initiative won little support and was scrapped, but Thatcher’s days were numbered. In November 1990 she was felled by a party coup and replaced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major.”
“Europe needs an army to fight the resource wars of the twenty-first century.”
Jacques Delors
“I have five questions that I ask people who have power, and I recommend them to the House. If I see someone who is powerful, be it a traffic warden, Rupert Murdoch, the head of a trade union or a Memb...”
Jacques Delors