Eurozone a group of nations divided by a common currency

I MAKE no apologies for using valuable space on the page today to extensively quote others. The remarks deserve airing. They must not be edited. They must not be paraphrased. The remarks below, from prime ministers and chancellors to EU commissioners and central bank supremos, reveal the extent to which people have been misled about the so-called European project.

In July 2007, this is how Jean Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, described the effect on Britain of the new EU Reform Treaty that would be signed in Lisbon in December that year: "Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"

At a meeting of the Centre for European Reform on July 12, 2007, Guiliano Amato, former Italian prime minister and former vice-president of the convention responsible for writing the original EU constitution, said the EU leaders "decided that the document (the Reform Treaty) should be unreadable to make our citizens happy, to produce a document that they will never understand".

In March 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: "We have a treaty under which there is no possibility of paying to bail out states in difficulty."

And this from Conclusions of the European Council Meeting in Laeken in mid-December 2001: "The euro area now represents a pole of stability for those countries participating."

Some years earlier, in March 1995, the then British prime minister John Major said: "I think it's possible to go to monetary union without going to political union." Two years later, on March 14, 1997, then president of the German Bundesbank, Hans Tietmeyer said: "It will be extremely important for the euro area to restrict entry to those countries which are ready in terms of their economic and anti-inflation policies."

And this from present British Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in 2002: "The euro has done more to enforce budgetary discipline, to promote privatisation and force through labour and product market liberalisation (than) any number of exhortations from the IMF, the OECD, or the editors of The Economist."

There are many, many more such comments from members of the European political class who have either been incredibly naive, unconsciously mischievous or deliberately misleading about the effect of the EU on the daily lives of Europeans. More important than any potential ruse though, there is a bigger cause for alarm. The EU is surely on a collision course with democracy.

That is why British Prime Minister David Cameron was absolutely right to call for reform of Britain's settlement with the EU followed by an "in/out" referendum for the British people by 2017.

It is time, as Cameron said last week, to give the British people "their say" on Euroland - as the EU was quaintly called by one Eurocrat.

And it may not be long before that democratic desire to have a say about the EU spreads across the continent.

As MPs in the British House of Commons gather tomorrow to debate Cameron's Europe plan, it's worth revisiting the extent to which people have been hoodwinked.

In May 2010 the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy admitted that "nobody ever told the proverbial man in the street that sharing a single currency was not just about making lives easier when doing business or travelling abroad, but also about being directly affected by the economic developments in the neighbouring countries".

As Vincenzo Scarpetta, an analyst with Open Europe, told London's The Daily Telegraph after Van Rompuy's admission: "The eurozone crisis is not simply about economic failure but also a breakdown in trust between the political class and European citizens. The EU elite simply got it wrong on the euro."

In fact, EU lickspittles failed to tell the man in the street the truth on many other matters. Open Europe, an independent think tank with offices in London and Brussels, published a report in 2010 that ought to be mandatory reading for anyone concerned about the future of the EU.

The report, "They Said It: How the EU Elite Got It Wrong on the Euro", includes 24 pages of what elites said "then" (when they were selling the EU project to the people of the 27 member states) and what they say "now" (once reality struck).

Bailouts to decrepit member states began (trillions and still counting), Greece's fudge to join the EU was exposed ("we knew that Greece was cheating" admitted the EU Commissioner for Trade, Karel de Gucht), monetary union was transformed into a "transfer union" - a "violation of every rule", said former Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl and stability for EU member states became a Europhile pipedream ("All European countries are currently living beyond their means," admitted European central bank executive board member Lorenzo Bini-Smagi).

Last week, Cameron laid down an overdue challenge to the EU - not only "a better deal for Britain" but also a "better deal for Europe".

As Cameron said, "more of the same will just deliver more of the same: less competitiveness, less growth, fewer jobs".

The British PM pointed to Europe's lack of competitiveness - during the next two decades, Europe's share of world output is estimated to fall by almost one-third.

He said the complex rules constricting Europe's labour markets must change, and so must the "sclerotic, ineffective decision making", the dead weight of the EU's one-size-fits-all model, and the inexorable growth of EU bureaucracies. "Can we justify a commission that gets ever larger?" he asked rhetorically.

Most importantly, Cameron insisted that the EU confront its democratic deficit. The EU is not government by the people for the people. In Britain, support for the EU is wafer thin, said Cameron, as more and more Britons feel that the EU has become something they never signed up to.

"They resent the interference in our national life by what they see as unnecessary rules and regulations. And they wonder what the point of it all is."

For example, it makes no sense, that membership of the EU means that bureaucrats in Brussels decide the working hours of doctors in British hospitals "irrespective of the views of British parliamentarians and practitioners".

Referring to a current competence review of "where the EU helps and where it hampers", nothing should be off the table, said Cameron. Not social affairs. Not crime. Not environmental policies. Hopefully not bananas or cucumbers either. Both items have been subjected to EU regulations setting out permissible curvature.

You can see why Britons may find Cameron's call for a return to democratic accountability appealing. EU institutions can draft regulations, design flags, print the euro and build bureaucracies. But they cannot create a European identity. There are only national identities.

As Cameron said, national parliaments instil respect, even fear, into national leaders. He might have added that, by contrast, EU institutions encourage isolation from and contempt for the people.

So far most European leaders have offered a haughty sniff at Cameron's European vision for the people for Britain. The longer-term test is for the people of Europe: will Eurocrats correct the con they perpetrated on their people so that old-fashioned democracy - and accountability - can flourish? Let us hope the answer is ja, oui, si, rather than nein, non, no.