ANYONE at all interested in the rip-tide of history, upon which the ship of state is spinning - and our lives with it - will have searched in vain for anything better than a feeble, superficial analysis of the event, which shook the smug towers of Brussels, last Sunday.

All the French media, the French government and all the senior politicians of Europe - with the honourable exception of the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus - tried, and failed, to make France vote "oui".

And now that their Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off the wall and smashed, they dare not examine the wreckage, which is much too revealing for their taste.

The most they will venture - beyond a defiant cry of "the ratification-process must continue" - is to dismiss the result as an aberration of "internal, French politics".

But the only truth in this is that the French, having studied politics and philosophy at school, are an unusually sophisticated electorate, and know an affront to democracy and sound reasoning, when it is thrust down their throats.

Like their continental counterparts, the commentators of the British, EU-philiac media (which is all of the media, including the ones that support the Conservative Party) scratch their heads and wonder how to avoid explaining the fact that both Left and Right, in France, voted against this "EU-constitution".

The explanation is all too simple: the Right hates big-government, and the Left hates big-business. The EU, as revealed at last, to the French, by this "constitution", is a combination of big-business and big-government - the enemy, at one and the same time, of free public services and free enterprise. Only a minority of naive sentimentalists were starry-eyed enough to ignore this and vote "yes".

STEVE REED,

Rue Peter Benot,

1040 Brussels, Belgium.