The New Soviet Union of Europe is upon us

I want to make your flesh creep, to frighten and perplex you. I can see no other way to alert this country and its people to the approaching end of a thousand years of history.

We are about to be extinguished as an independent nation. We are about to lose the power to control our own destiny, to make and enforce our own laws.

The threat comes from a bundle of paper, from a tedious conference in that grey, foggy capital of dullness, Brussels. There, for some months, a special convention has been drawing up the European Union's new constitution. And that means they have been drawing up our constitution, since we will be bound by it.

The document, driven through by the autocratic French ex-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, has a simple purpose. It turns the EU into a state.

Its core, Article 9, declares: 'The Constitution, and law adopted by Union institutions in exercising competences conferred on it by the Constitution, shall have primacy over the law of the member States.'

This means that, once it is in force, a centralised Europe will be the source of power, not the nations that make it up.

No doubt bits and pieces of it can be, and will be, modified at the conferences which will discuss it. Anthony Blair will engineer a fake confrontation in which he will 'win' the 'right' to keep command of our own Armed Forces and our own foreign policy for a few years.

But the other parts of the treaty will make all that meaningless. Because piece by piece and hour by hour the power to take important decisions will be packed up in boxes and shipped from Westminster and Whitehall to Brussels.

Our courts will have to defer to the European Supreme Court in Luxembourg. If European officials disagree with British Ministers, the Euromen will have the upper hand. The European Charter of Fundamental Rights, a document so vague that it offers no serious protection against repression, will be the basis of all legal decisions.

Parliament will no longer be able even to pretend to have the final say on anything.

At the same time, the police on the streets will begin to enforce European, rather than British, laws.

So will the courts. And those who break European laws will - especially if they travel to other EU countries - be open to prosecution even if the things they have done are not officially illegal in Britain.

A European Public Prosecutor will decide what goes to court. And since hardly any other EU country has jury trial, the presumption of innocence or habeas corpus, our courts will come under pressure to fall into line with theirs.

These are not small things. Nor are they disliked by everyone. Some will co-operate with this new order because it gives them things they have always wanted. Most of our liberty depends on the fact that the authorities cannot push us around, even if they want to.

Governments usually do want to shove people around, and officials and bureaucrats loathe the annoying restraints placed on them by what they see as silly and finicky documents such as the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights - both of which will be quietly strangled by the new Euro-Constitution.

The British Home Office longs to get rid of inconvenient juries. British chief constables would love to be running the centralised, powerful police forces of the Continent.

Our bureaucrats yearn for the security and freedom from accountability which their European counterparts enjoy.

Many of our politicians would love to have the lives of easy privilege, permanent perks and closed-list elections which beckon from Brussels.

And the Labour Party's brighter members have long wanted the introduction of EU regulations and rights, which will reverse once and for all the economic and trade union reforms of the Thatcher era.

They know they cannot get this past the electorate, but they will not need to when all such decisions are taken elsewhere, in distant office blocks which the power of the voters cannot reach.

A lot of people have an interest in seeing that this country is governed by foreign officials. It is only the rest of us, who pay taxes rather than live off them, who need to challenge authority from time to time to stay free, who will be hurt by the secret plan to turn us into a province of the New Soviet Union which Giscard is planning.

Anthony Blair, who speaks for this class, has endorsed the new plans twice, in a littlenoticed speech in Cardiff in November 2002 and a communiquÈ issued in Madrid in February this year, when he presumably hoped nobody was looking.

But do we care enough? British people are so accustomed to living in freedom that they do not really understand what a rare thing it is, or how much difference it makes. They think it is a natural feature, like the grass underfoot or the sky above.

But just as the grass grows weedy and thin if neglected, and the sky grows filthy and murky if we allow it to be polluted, freedom must be guarded and tended constantly.

Even when the threat is obvious, we do not always pay attention.

Encouraged by the ludicrously pro-Brussels BBC, we tend to think that this issue is just a concern of a few loopy, obsessed Tories.

Not so. That phrase about 'a thousand years of history' comes from a great speech made by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1962, shortly before he died, warning of the dangers of joining the then Common Market.

Gaitskell was nobody's idea of a fringe lunatic, but he knew, even then, that the European scheme was a menace to our liberty, and he was right.

At the very least, this horrible plan should not be allowed to become law without a referendum.

And if its supporters say that the alternative is to leave the European Union altogether, then I for one could not think of a better moment to escape this dreary prison-house of nations and rediscover our destiny as a global, open, free civilisation.