EUROPE: WITH the prospect of the EU Constitution being signed up to without the consent of the British people, I will follow with interest the position of the elected representatives of the people of the North-East, both MPs and MEPs.

Who amongst them will dare deny the people their democratic right?

Surely, if it is our democratic right, we are told, to have a referendum on a North-East Assembly, then we cannot be denied one on an issue of such national constitutional significance, and one which will fundamentally change the way we are governed.

I eagerly await their responses. - Neil Herron, Sunderland.

IF the European Constitution will mean so little to Britain, as Tony Blair claims, that it is not worth holding a referendum over it, why is it taking so much discussion? Why so many draft copies?

There must be something in it to warrant such detailed discussion and debate.

Mr Blair and his pro-Europe brigade cannot fool the British people by tossing aside their concerns, claiming there is nothing in the proposed constitution that will affect our national sovereignty. Of course there is.

Mr Blair has no right to sign such a vitally important document without fully consulting the people in a referendum. He is supposed to be our nation's servant, not our dictator. - EA Moralee, Billingham.

YOU report (Echo, May 28) that £150m will be given to rural post offices from the European Union, an aid package having been approved by the European Commission.

In fact, this money is just a little bit of our own money back from the EU, since we pay in more than twice what we get back. Why should we have to go, cap in hand, to Brussels before being able to aid our own rural communities?

We should keep our hard-earned taxes here, and make our own decisions for the benefit of all British citizens. Unelected officials in Brussels are ill-equipped to rule on such matters.

The proposed EU constitution, on which the Government does not wish us to have a vote, will remove virtually all decision making from the British people. - Judith Wallace, Whitley Bay.

AT last we have woken up and realised that, over the last year in Brussels, a European Constitution has been drafted.

The Convention that was set the task of doing this was no big secret, it has been meeting in public, comprising elected government ministers, national MPs and MEPs and members of civil society.

It has tried to seek the views of European society at large, but until now in Britain it has been impossible to get a debate on the issue at all.

The draft constitution spells out what decisions should be taken at European level. This will give the kind of transparency about the workings of Europe that has never been available to our citizens before.

We are not told what to do by others. British Ministers help shape laws which are equally binding on other EU countries and as MEPs we do the same in the European Parliament.

We work within the EU because the world is now dominated by international organisations that no one country can control.

If the current hysteria about the proposed EU constitution makes us debate our relationship with Europe, then so much the better.

I am one of those who believe that we would have benefited from a debate and a referendum at each treaty change.

We have to have this debate and if the Government denies the people a referendum on the final result of the proposed constitution it, like its predecessors, will find that Europe could be its downfall. - Diana Wallis, Member of the European Parliament, Liberal Democrat, Yorkshire and the Humber.

NO one will ever be able to quantify the damage being done to this country's sovereignty by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Union.

Now Tony Blair says the British people do not need a referendum on the creation of a United States of Europe, even though it is an issue which will destroy whole areas of national life for ever.

His is surely the voice of new communism - bringing coercion where there should be freedom and greyness where there should be culture.

Britain is beginning to look unerringly like pre-glasnost Russia, for the elite - like Russia's then - seems deaf to even the smallest wishes and wants of the people it governs. - Aled Jones, Bridlington.

HEALTH SERVICE

THE Government's own figures show that hospital waiting lists are getting worse, not better, in the North-East.

The latest statistics on inpatient waiting lists for the region show how the Government's top-down, centrally-directed health system is failing. In Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham waiting lists are greater than they were three years ago.

These hospitals all have two or even three stars in the Government's dodgy rating system, designed to cover-up the shortcomings of one of our last nationalised industries. Like most nationalised industries, the National Health Service receives ever-larger sums of taxpayers' money whilst delivering ever-poorer services. This is not the fault of the people working in our hospitals, but rather of an utterly outdated Stalinist state system.

When will the Government realise that because Whitehall pays for our healthcare (with our money), it should not run it the way it used to run car factories, airlines, the phone system, power stations and the rest? - Dr Jeremy Stocker, Durham.