Mr President, Madam President-in-office of Council, Mr Donnelly in his maiden speech a few minutes ago told this Parliament we should be grateful to Mr Major. Well, colleagues, this Parliament is grateful for many things, but grateful to Mr Major is not, I think, one of them. Earlier this month Mr Major gave a speech in the Netherlands which was meant to form part of the opening shots debate on the demands that we make of Europe in the agenda for the 1996 IGC. This agenda must not turn into "Maastricht, The Monster Returns". This agenda must be open and clear and accountable to the European electorate. We must learn the lessons of the Maastricht debacle. The speech was a string of cliches and catch-alls that Mr Major gave with no real analysis, conclusions or vision and was held together by sellotape borrowed from the Euro-phobics of his Conservative right-wing. It exerted no influence on the earlier debate from the CDU in Germany and from Mr Balladur in France.

Mr Major claims to be against a two-track, two-speed Europe yet his government is in favour of a fast track for the market and a slow track for the rights of working people; a fast track for the speculator and the polluter and a slow track for the 18 million un-employed in Europe; and a dead slow and stop track for British new fathers or British young workers and for European works councils, as well a host of other people that we represent in this Parliament.

The sovereignty of all Member States should be respected but that does not mean an a la carte Europe should become the norm in the operation of the European Union, as Mr Martens pointed out earlier this morning. Sometimes we hear stories in the United Kingdom of the police arresting a confused elderly person who is discovered driving an old car at twenty miles an hour in the fast lane of a four-speed, four-track motorway going in the wrong direction. That metaphor describes the British Tory government policy on Europe : confused, dangerous and going in the wrong direction.