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The implications for sovereignty were not simply minimized, they were expressly denied. In a television broadcast to mark Britain's formal accession to the EEC in 1973, the prime minister declared: 'There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.'3 That statement has been thrown back at the Conservative Party ever since. People felt, with reason, that they had been deceived by their leaders, that they had joined on a false premise. Instead of becoming members of what they had assumed to be a free market, based on the unrestricted circulation of goods and mutual recognition of products, they had joined a quasi-state which was in the process of acquiring all the machinery of democratic representation and legal coercive power.