- guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 December 2000 01.25 GMT
Keith Vaz, the minister for Europe, is to mount a new year propaganda offensive in parliament in a bid to shore up support for the proposal.
The degree of opposition voiced at Westminster has surprised and irritated Foreign Office officials. "We have a serious job of persuasion ahead in Britain, let alone Brussels," admitted a Downing Street official.
The prime minister put forward the idea of a second chamber made up of members of national parliaments in a speech in Warsaw three months ago.
Mr Blair sees the proposal as the best hope for a distinctive British reform agenda in the wake of the EU's inter-governmental conference in Nice which saw further extension of majority voting.
He wants the second chamber to act as a watchdog to prevent the European commission from coming forward with directives or regulations in areas that properly should be the preserve of nation states.
He believes the idea could act as a constraint on the natural tendency of commission officials, and the European parliament, to back ever closer integration.
It might also help connect national parliaments and citizens with the EU institutions.
Mr Blair and the Foreign Office are working to convince Britain's European partners of the benefits of the proposals , and believe they have secured backing in principle from five other states, including Germany.
Britain wants the proposal, enthusiastically supported by EU commissioner Chris Patten, to be one of the central ideas in the run-up to a further EU inter-governmental conference in 2003 or 2004.
Pan-European support might help Mr Blair convince a sceptical British public that the tide of integration is finally being halted, so helping him to prepare the electorate for the possibility of joining a single currency.
However, the idea was given a roasting when first scrutinised at Westminster by the Lords select committee on Europe.
Opposition came not only from pro-integrationist Liberal Democrats, but also from Conservative sceptic peers, such as Lord Lamont, who might have been seen as natural supporters of the proposals. Lord Lamont argued the proposal would be unworkable without a written EU constitution setting out clearly the powers of the EU, the nation state and the region.
Other peers said they feared the idea would be either a mere talking shop or an extra layer of EU bureaucracy. The Labour peer Lord Brooke said he struggled to see what the second chamber could achieve that was not already available.
Similar resentment is building up on the Commons European scrutiny select committee. Britain is proposing the second chamber meet three or four times a year and have as many as 10 parliamentarians appointed from each state. It has not yet decided whether it should merely say whether a proposal satisfies the principles of subsidiarity or not, or whether it could order a delay or revision by the commission of an offending proposal.
