As everybody knows, I do not believe in the European Union; I regard it as an enemy of democracy, and I approach this from an opposite direction. No nation should be pouring taxpayers' money into a corrupt system. After 11 long years in which the EU's accounts have been rejected by its own auditors, this weak-kneed attempt to change the system seems to me like pouring huge amounts of gold dust through a sieve, thinking 'oh, perhaps we better try and stuff up a few of the holes'. No one thinks about the wisdom of pouring the dust through the sieve in the first place and quite simply the way to stop the dust being lost is to stop pouring.

As a member of the Committee on Budgetary Control, my role has always been to look into where the money has been lost or misused and where mistakes have been made – the phrase that Mr Kallas has just used. I was working entirely on the assumption that the reason we were calling for these declarations was that the Member States would look into where the waste and fraud had come and, maybe, even corruption. It was under those terms that I was asking to express my opinions in my speech.

However, what were Mozart’s political views, if any? On hearing the news of Britain's relief of Gibraltar and the victory over the French navy at Trincomalee, he wrote to his father, Leopold: 'Indeed, I have heard about England's victories and I am greatly delighted too, for you know that I am out-and-out Englishman'. Did the Austrian Presidency know that it was celebrating the birth of a self-proclaimed Englishman?

Now Mr Blair wants to embroil the British nation in yet another lie and fantasy. That lie is that Britain's national interest lies in something called a European common foreign policy.

Yesterday also marked another significant event. In London, Mr Javier Solana spoke on the Palestinian issue on behalf of the European Union. He did so in the de facto role of the European Foreign Minister. This is despite the fact that the European common foreign policy should be dead and buried because of the rejection of the European constitution. This is a clear signal that the Labour government is surrendering control of foreign policy to the European Union.

Chancellor Bismarck once famously remarked that the whole of the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Well, the whole of the European common foreign policy and the planned European army is not worth the bones of one single British serviceman or woman.

So here it is, another second-class act, the Postal Directive. This is none of the EU's business, and I advise the EU to stay out of it. The Postal Directive seeks to impose value added tax on postage at a time when letter writing is under great competition from e-mail. The UK does not want it! The British Post Office is now 371 years old, and it was the British in 1840 who brought out the first postage stamp, bearing the head of Queen Victoria.

Now the EU wants to stamp its dead hand of inefficiency on it. A high watermark of philatelic interference, perforated only by ignorance of British tradition and a wish to kill letter writing stone dead. From Penny Black to EU attack in 166 years! Is this progress?

In 2004 the Postmaster General stated categorically that the British Government did not want VAT on stamps. The Royal Mail told me this very week that it does not want it, as it would be bad for small businesses, charities and customers. The British people do not want it. They are already paying for the cost of the EU’s common agricultural policy.

What would Stanley Gibbons have said from the Strand in London if he had still been alive? I suggest he would have published a book with pictures of MEPs who monkey with British postal traditions entitled 'Stanley Stamps Gibbon Catalogue'.

When UKIP vote on this report, it will vote in accordance with the wishes of UK citizens. I hope British MEPs stick up for Britain. The people will watch as Europhiles submit their nations to another excessive stamp of EU authority. Thank you, Mr President, and good luck to the interpreters!

500 million Europeans travelled by coach in 2005, many of them elderly people. This legislation encourages smaller vehicles, creating greater congestion, emissions and expense. But emission-sensitive charging already exists: it is called fuel duty. Is that too simple for the EU?

However, the cost of all this is really about EU taxation for a centralised Europe and funding a satellite, is it not? It has nothing to do with roads.

This also demonstrates the utter pointlessness of this Parliament and its committee system. The candidates for the post gave presentations before the Committee on Budgetary Control. We questioned them and ultimately voted for a better candidate from Sweden. Now we find that the whole time-consuming process was a meaningless charade.

This Parliament regularly churns out details like that, prepared by people who probably have not the faintest idea what it is like out in the real world, where real people have to try to put all these new rules into practice and still manage to turn a profit. Not only do the authors of this report wish to see this new regime inflicted on chicken meat producers in the 25 Member States, but they also make it clear that they expect non-EU countries to follow suit. Some chance, I would suggest!

I come from a country that already has very high standards of animal welfare and hygiene, which are vigorously policed. We do not need a supranational bureaucratic dictatorship to tell us how to look after our chickens. The authors of this report have laid an egg and I suggest they scramble it.

(Applause from the IND/DEM Group)

Currently the EU is spending over half its budget on state aid. Britain is far from rich as it is. We are being told that our government cannot afford to pay us a decent pension unless we work until we are 70. Our health service is seriously underfunded and our navy, which is a fraction of the size it once was, can hardly afford to pay for the fuel it needs to go to sea.

Let us stop this crazy idea now before the so-called rich Member States end up totally impoverished. Instead, why do we not help to improve the economies of our European neighbours and of Third World countries by opening up free trade opportunities to them? If this enriches us all, as I think it will, individual Member States might then be in a position to help their neighbours financially; but charity should begin at home.

This place is the problem, it is not the solution. Perhaps we should occupy our time with a standardisation of windscreen wipers or spirit bottles, or phasing out the oldest profession in the world, or some such nonsense. Let us see if serious thought should be left to those with experience of the real world, sadly unrepresented in this place.

This report criticises the fact that the clause does not exist in three big areas, namely agriculture, fisheries and textiles. Of course democracy and human rights should be encouraged in all the states of the world which are unfortunate enough not to enjoy them already. All decent democratic states should use their relations with other countries – diplomatic and trading, cultural, etc. – to encourage the growth of democracy and human rights, something that my country, Britain, has done for many years.

However, this report says that the clause must apply in all countries equally. Has this been properly thought out? If so, it will apply to China and other developing economies in the Far East and other parts of the world. Many jobs depend on trading relations with China and the number will increase in the future. Are we really saying that we are going to turn the tide of history by telling China to turn into a democratic country with full human rights overnight, just on the basis of one report from the European Parliament? I think not.

Today the United Nations has called for Guantanámo Bay to be closed and there are many human rights questions hanging over what the Americans are doing in Guantanámo Bay. If this agreement is to apply equally to all countries, are we going to suspend relations with the US if we think that it is contravening human rights in Guantanámo Bay?

I was also struck by the arrogance of the Commissioner in demanding that other countries, such as China and Japan, abolish the death penalty if they want to have relations with the EU. I think that is an unbelievable intrusion into the democratic and sovereign right of other countries to have a penal system that suits them and their citizens rather than the European Union. The European Union itself is undermining democracy in all its Member States. I know at first hand how democracy in Britain has been undermined by our relationship with the European Union and our increasing political integration into a United States of Europe. So I think perhaps the European Union should put its own House in order first, as far as democracy is concerned. Perhaps it could make a start by paying attention to the results in the Dutch and French referendums on the Constitution.

I suggest that this report is not properly thought out. Yes, we want democracy and human rights in all the countries of the world. But let us try to do it by setting an example in friendship, rather than setting criteria and conditions that will not be met.

When we talked in 1999 about the creation of a single market in financial services, all my friends in the real world in the City of London said: 'Nigel, you have got it wrong'. I am fairly used to people telling me that I have got it wrong. But, seven years on, what has happened? We have a financial services action plan, we have the implementation of 42 new directives and the burden on financial services is heavier than it was before. Businesses are leaving every day and moving to Switzerland and Bermuda and the same thing will happen with the services directive.

The application of this directive will vary from country to country. The Commission will say that we need more harmonisation measures to make it work. The burden on business will increase and, worst of all, it will be the European Court of Justice that can legislate and decide on all this. This directive represents yet another massive shift of power from the Member States to these failing institutions. They will no longer be able to run their own economies. We shall vote 'no'.

(Applause from the IND/DEM Group)

I am gratified to see that the report acknowledges that the CAP has 'encouraged the development of non-sustainable production methods heavily dependent on water and energy'. But, judging by this weekend’s newspaper revelations that the EU has a surplus of four billion bottles of wine, costing the taxpayers a billion a year, not much has been learnt in that area.

I would ask Members to reject this report, until a study has been made of the practical implications and the cost of implementing its recommendations. It seems to me that trying to protect farmers against everything, including weather aberrations such as storms, as this report indicates, will be extremely expensive and possibly fruitless in the end, because who can predict the unpredictable?

The world became used to the nuclear stand-off between the democratic west and the communist east during the Cold War, but in that confrontation, disaster was avoided because ultimately both sides were rational. The religious fundamentalists of Iran are not rational. An Iranian nuclear device could turn out to be the biggest suicide bomb the world has ever seen. In this situation all the options are dangerous but the most dangerous option is doing nothing at all.

These proposed restrictions on the good management of transport businesses make several huge and utterly unjustified assumptions. They assume that business managers do not know how best to organise their businesses and balance customer needs with staff resources. They assume they think it is worth taking risks – criminal risks at that – in overworking tired drivers, and publicity risks if they are found guilty. It assumes that owner-drivers do not know what is in their own best interests.

Over the last half-century, social engineering of this kind has proved beyond doubt that it simply does not work. When will it dawn on you that the European economic mess is precisely because of this kind of interference? This proposal is a sledgehammer to crack a nut and, just like the port services directive, it should be disposed of into the waste bin.