BUM WRAP

Now that Europe has fixed the market in

jeans, Simon Nixon says that anti-federalists

must fight the system from within

IN the end, it was the jeans wot did it for me, All my adult life, I've prided myself on my commitment to the Eurosceptic cause. Six years in the City may have cured me, pace Peter Mandelson, of a youthful attachment to some of the wilder claims of Thatcherite economics; a decade of enthusiastically inhaling the heady pleasures of life in the Big Smoke may have led me to part company with Ann Widdecombe on most of the big social issues of our time; but, in my opposition to a federal Europe, I have always considered myself defiantly on the side of the angels.

God knows, I tried to do my bit. At Cambridge in the early Nineties, I established my very own ginger group to agitate against the Maastricht Treaty. Like the Judaean People's Front, our Pythonesque team of intrepid resistance fighters would meet at the back of dingy pubs to discuss what we should call ourselves and how we might persuade rival groups to merge with us in the interests of unity. On one occasion, we printed a pile of leaflets. It is quite possible we actually distributed them.

I even spent several weeks one summer holed up with the great Bill Cash, helping him disgorge his voluminous knowledge of the perils of federalism into a book. If. at times, I felt a little like Arthur Dent being forced to listen to Vogon poetry, I did not complain: I was privileged to suffer for a noble cause. Since then, I've paid my subs, put up the posters, signed the petitions, and written dozens of articles rehearsing the arguments against the single currency.

But following last week's verdict in the High Court in the case of Tesco v. Levi Strauss, my days as a resistance fighter are over. With this depressing decision, it is clear the game is up. Faced with the latest onslaught from Brussels, our learned friends had an opportunity to strike a blow for the ancient liberties of all freeborn Englishmen, to invoke the spirit of Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, the Great Reform Act and every other piece of legislation designed to protect our hard-won freedoms, and they blew it. As a result of their timidity, a foreign company can now tell a British retailer what it can and cannot sell in its own shop.

The case centred on the right of Tesco to stock Levi jeans. Tesco had tracked down suppliers in South America able to sell Levis at prices that would enable Tesco substantially to undercut the price of Levis in the UK's high streets. But Levis was having none of it. The fact that Levis had already sold these jeans to the distributor did not matter. The price of a pair of 501s is not supposed to be set by the market but by Levis itself, which reserves the right to dictate exactly where and when and how and at what price you can buy a pair of Levis, depending on where you happen to live. The fact that 501s cost $20 in Mexico and £50 in the British high street is none of your business; if you're buying jeans in Market Harborough, you pay the British price.

Besides, you must understand that Levis is trying to do us a favour by keeping the price of its jeans artificially high: a pair of 501s may be cheap everyday wear in the good old US of A, but for us Brits paying through the nose is an integral part of the Levis experience. Indeed, it is because they want us to enjoy our Levis experience so much that those considerate chaps at Levis are determined that nasty, low-rent places like Tesco, which also sell food, should not be allowed to stock its products.

One would like to think that if Levis had

tried this nonsense on in a British court, it would have been told exactly where it could stick its precious red labels. After all, it is not illegal to import jeans to Britain, it is not illegal to sell jeans in Britain, and the Food Standards Authority has not yet ruled it illegal to sell jeans and dairy products under the same roof. Moreover, if Tesco legally acquired a consignment of bona fide Levis from a third party in Mexico, why should a British court lose sleep worrying about the implications for our Levis experience? But when this case did come before a British court four years ago, it was. sadly. referred straight to Europe.

Last November, the European Court of Justice finally came back with its ruling. In a landmark judgment it ruled that retailers must seek permission from brand owners before sourcing goods outside the EU. The implication is that we live in fortress Europe, a protectionist trading bloc in which giant multinationals can use the law to block competition from outside the EU. This blatantly political ruling was based upon the equally absurd EU trademark directive, which allows trademark holders to continue to control the market in their products even after they have been sold. It is a law that flies in the face of both common sense and the principles of free trade.

What makes this decision all the more frustrating is that it plays into the hands of those who have always maintained that globalisation is a con. Yes, we were told. globalisation may cost jobs in old manufacturing industries, but at least we will get cheaper goods. But, thanks to the ECJ's ridiculous judgment, multinationals can keep using World Trade Organisation rules to move production overseas, while using EU trademark laws to keep European prices artificially high. But think what would happen to our advertising industry if we didn't enable big spenders like Levis to protect their brands, say apologists for the law. Well, yes — and no doubt if any harm came to the advertising industry, the bottom would fall out of the cocaine market, too (one wonders whether cheap cocaine would diminish the cocaine experience?). But try telling that to the 500 Dr Martens workers who lost their jobs last month, yet must still pay through the nose for their jeans.

Faced with such lunacy, you might think that the obvious thing is to change the law. But how? According to the way that the EU operates, the only way this law can be changed is by amending the original directive, which means securing a majority in the Council of Ministers. Fat chance. It is no fluke that a trademark directive which explicitly denies the principle of international exhaustion — the idea that a trademark holder cannot restrict supply once it has placed its goods in the market — found its way on to the statute book.

The French and Italians, in particular, have huge luxury-goods industries that have a strong vested interest in retaining the status quo.

Now that the British High Court has so spinelessly declined the opportunity to declare the Eel's judgment in breach of basic human rights (It was a straightforward political decision,' one lawyer connected with the case told me, 'nothing to do with the law'). the only way to change this law now is to first change the constitution of the EU. It seems highly improbable that the people of Europe, given the opportunity, would actually vote for a law that so clearly works against their interests. Yet where is the Europe-wide political party willing to take up the cause? Where is the Europe-wide legislature with the power to debate the issues and change the law? And where is the Europe-wide executive with the popular mandate to initiate change?

Surely the time has come for intelligent Eurosceptics to recognise that we now live in a federal Europe whether we like it or not. Further resistance is useless. Instead, we need to look for inspiration to the greatest of all anti-federalists, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. If Britain, like post-revolutionary Virginia, now finds itself unable to resist the inexorable march of federalism, it should follow the example of the Virginians and throw itself into the framing of a new constitution that will thwart the ambitions of those latter-day Hamiltons and Adams, with their centralising instincts.

Unless Conservatives can find leaders with the imagination and vision of Jefferson and Madison, the EU will continue to develop in ways that are offensive to everything Conservatives hold dear. That is why I'm running up the white flag. I know when I'm beaten. This is not to say I am about to join the Britain In Europe campaign, with its avowedly federalist instincts. It is time instead to convene a new group committed to ensuring that the anti-federalist agenda is heard in the EU constitutional convention. It could adopt as its motif a pair of Levis: symbol of the ultimate bum wrap.