[fso301]

Contrary to what Nigel says, it was obvious from the outset that the Common Market was a necessary step on the path to a single state.

[agere_contra]

Wrong.

A Common Market was acceptable to the people of Europe. It didn’t turn out to be a Common Market but a constraining Customs Union - but that’s beside the point. The idea of a common market was a popular idea ratified by referenda.

However a single state is not and never has been acceptable to the people of Europe. Whenever they’ve been asked about political unuion or fiscal union: member states have loudly said NO again and again.

The concept of the Euopean state is clearly illegitimate. The ultra-vires creation of the trappings of a European state is also illegitimate. It will fail - it is failing - because the people do not want it.

[holden]

Your construct is wrong. That's not what Farage said.   Farage says Europeans wanted the Common Market as an expression of useful, common standards and good neighborliness, but not as an endorsement of a single European state.   Some have hijacked the very word 'European' as if it were an endorsement of a state that has never existed. He says that Europeans have increasingly, clandestinely and un democratically have been forced into something to which they didn't give their assent, and dramatically would not have given their assent if statists had been honest earlier, prior to the appearance of their draft constitution.

I agree with him and think he's potentially got a great future if he can survive.

HF

[Vanders9]

Of course it was an obvious first step, but the point is that the second step did not have to be taken. The common market could just simply have stopped at that point - an open doors agreement designed to encourage trade and understanding between nations. Nothing wrong with that.

To say it was an obvious first step is a bit like saying the Apollo 11 landings were an obvious first step towards colonising Mars. They could indeed have been that, IF the next steps had been taken - but none of them have. Mores the pity.