(The Independent, 8-9-94)

JOHN MAJOR last night unfurled his standard for the battle of ideas over the EU's future by declaring that he "recoiled" from the Franco-German idea of a "hard core" group of European countries from which Britain would be excluded.

The Prime Minister used a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands to launch his first counter-offensive against the evolving concept of an inner Europe by rejecting a Union "in which some would be more equal than others".

At the same time he again implicitly underlined the deep differences over the direction of the EU between Britain and some of her most powerful partners, including Germany, by calling for a "flexible" Europe and warning that "if we try to force all European countries into the same mould we shall end up cracking that mould."

Mr Major's "William and Mary" lecture was the most substantial since he vetoed the choice of the Belgian Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, as president of the EU. Mr Deheane was widely held in London to have been the candidate of exactly the sort of select Franco-German dominated group that would be institutionalised in the "inner core" plan.

The speech was also Mr Major's most ambitious attempt to reconcile the Govermment's desire to choose which areas of policy it wants to participate fully in, while at the same time retaining Britain's status as one of the EU's influential members.

He said it was "perfectly healthy" for all EU members to integrate more closely or more quickly in "certain areas" - he cited the British and Danish opt-outs from monetary union agreed at Maastricht. But he added that "the corollary is that no member state should be excluded from an area of policy in which it wants and is qualified to participate".

The Prime Minister was careful to congratulate the instigators of the new thinking, the French Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur, and policymakers in the ruling German Christian Democratic Union, for recognising the need for diversity within the EU - saying that was not a "weakness to be suppressed but a strength to be harnessed".

But he added: "I see a real danger in talk of a 'hard core, inner and outer circles, a two-tier Europe.... There is not, and never

should be, an exclusive hard core of either countries or of policies. The EU involves a wide range of common policies and areas of close cooperation.

"No member states should lay claim to a privileged status on the basis of their participation in some of them."

Going further than before in laying out his agenda for the 1996 intergovernmental conference on the future of EU institutions, the Prime Minister declared that "popular enthusiasm for the Union has waned. We need to listen to these warnings."

Among the practical priorities for 1996 he identified wholesale reform of the Common Agricultural Policy given added urgency by the prospect of new entrants from eastern Europe; curbs of some Commission powers and the addition of new ones to combat fraud, and reform of the qualified voting system which Britain vainly tried to challenge earlier this year.

But in terms which carried an echo of Lady Thatcher's Bruges speech in 1988, Mr Major stressed the importance of the "nation states" and was dismissive of the suggestion that the European Parliament should make up the European "democratic deficit". The European elections had a "pitiably low turn-out" and it was "national parliamentary democracy" which conferred legitimacy on the European Council of Ministers.

The hardline Eurosceptic view of the conflict was underlined yesterday by MP Nicholas Budgen who agreed that the nation state had to remain the backbone of EU co-operation, but Franco-German plans for providing an EU central core "must be a matter for them".

Donald MACINTYRE