From The Christopher Booker column in The Sunday Telegraph  29.April 2007

EU's back door is at No 308

As our EU partners, led by Angela Merkel, flounder about trying to find ways to
get the EU constitution back on track without any need for those beastly
referendums, startling light has been shed on another way the EU is already
misusing the famous Rome treaty to extend its powers.

The importance of the treaty, of which the constitution was merely another
instalment, is that everything the EU does has, in theory, to be legally
authorised by the articles it contains. These represent the powers legally ceded
by nation states to Brussels. But when the original treaty was signed 50 years
ago, it included a catch-all Article 235, which could be used to justify laws
not authorised elsewhere in the treaty - so long as they served the purposes of
the "common market".

In 1997 the article was renumbered as 308 and has long been used to smuggle in
laws which had nothing to do with the "common market". Only now, thanks to the
persistence of a Ukip peer, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, has the Government finally
come clean on how extensively Article 308 has been abused.

A list placed in the Lords Library shows that since 2004 the EU has used it no
fewer than 45 times. Many of these laws represent major extensions of its power,
such as that setting up an agency to administer the Charter of Fundamental
Rights, a significant part of the as-yet unratified constitution. Article 308
has also been used to authorise a whole range of other important measures, from
setting up a European Health and Safety Agency and increasing the powers of
Europol, the EU's police force, to co-ordinating national social security
systems.

When Lord Blackwell recently asked the Government how it could justify the
misuse of Article 308 in this way, he was sent a letter written in 2004 by Jack
Straw, as foreign secretary, explaining that 308 was no longer considered to
serve just its original "narrow and restrictive" purpose of promoting the common
market. It can now be used to justify anything that would help to achieve "one
of the objectives of the Community". Since one of those objectives is to pursue
"ever closer union", it is hard to see how, by Mr Straw's logic, Article 308
could not be used to whistle into law the whole of the constitution. Perhaps Mrs
Merkel would like to suggest it?