JIM Homewood (Your Letters, Feb 26) has found the right stick - but he has got hold of the wrong end!

The transnational EU is the only agency that has a chance of making the (80 per cent US) transnational corporations toe the legal line.

If the EU was more advanced in its policy and enforcement, Monsanto could never have bullied its way between the "Whitehalls" of Europe with White House connivance.

Those who believe in free markets should prove it. Refuse to buy anything Monsanto or with soya until it is labelled stating gene modification. If it does not work, the socialists are right in that the market is too important to leave to the marketeers.

The farmers voted for deregulation and found, with BSE, that a free market veto is more expensive than paying for regulation. During my last trip to France, I noticed that all public building sites had boards stating exactly how much town hall, Whitehall and EU money was being invested. The sooner that custom comes North the better. A lot more EU money was available to us than arrived, but the last government would not put down the matching funds to bring it in.

This country's total annual GNP is nearly £1 million million. An investment of £2,000 million through the EU is therefore a penny charity flag out of a fiver pocket money. Each of us every year spends £2,000 on social security, £400 on defence and £40 net on the EU.

The sooner we transfer some of that dole and defence money to investment, then the sooner the Third World and Eastern Europe will see things getting steadily better and the sooner economic migration and terrorism will drop. In turn, spending on dole and defence then drops faster than the need to invest rises.

There is only in-fluence; there is no such thing as out-fluence, not in the EU or anywhere else.

FRANK ADAM,

Hartley Avenue, Prestwich.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.