Leak reveals anti-EU pressure on Major

The full scale of the pressure on John Major to take a strongly Euro-sceptic line in the run-up to the 1996 conference on the future of the EU is underlined in a confidential document from the influential "Fresh Start" group of Tory backbenchers.

As the Cabinet managed to maintain its "sullen truce" - as one senior Minister describes it - in discussing strategy for the inter-governmental conference, the leak provides powerful evidence of the right-wing agenda which Mr Major is facing in trying to pacify his party.

The document says bluntly that the objective of merely "holding the line" against the further encroachment of EU powers is "far too limited in scope". Instead the group, which includes a number of Euro-sceptics who stopped well short of joining the rebellions of the "whipless" Tory MPs, argues in its paper that "even if we managed to make no alteration to the Treaty of Rome, central power would continue to grow".

In the face of signals from senior government ministers, not to mention the President of the European Commission, Jacques Santer, that the full- scale clawing back of key constitutional powers of EU institutions is "unrealistic", the document takes the sharply contrary view that "the policy . . . has to be one of large-scale repatriation of powers back to the nation state in general and the UK in particular."

Yesterday's Cabinet review of strategy towards the EU 1996 conference - which is now widely accepted as unlikely to reach a serious conclusion ahead of the general election - was said to have consisted in a "full" discussion of the options facing the UK. It was confidently said that no final decisions had been taken on the Tory right's demands for repatriation of EU powers.

But the Foreign Office has laid considerable emphasis in saying that British ministers and officials have not abandoned the goal of repatriation, that they are determined to continue the process of extending "subsidiarity" - the notion that the EU should cover only those functions which cannot better be executed by member states - and the continued drive towards deregulation. Both will be discussed when John Major meets the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, today in Bonn.

But the document makes it clear that this straegy does not go far enough. They call for: reform of the "structure" of the European Court of Justice, withdrawal from the "process" of currency union, and reduction of the "scope" of the supremacy of European law over that of member states. At the same time "radical" changes to the Common Fisheries Policy, "full reform" of the Common Agricultural Policy and "clear and binding treaty articles" on British retention of national frontiers and passport controls.