This puts us in a minority of a minority; we are part of the pro-European minority in the media, and a minority anti-EMU voice in that. We have agonised and argued about all this; in many ways, we would love to have been the paper that championed the single currency in the teeth of the John Bull brigade. (John Bulls, it should be added, who live abroad and are against the EU in part because they fear that it might try to regulate properly their global businesses.)But there are deep democratic problems about having a pan-European economic policy. We may come to that, though the decay of the Major administration has probably exaggerated the strength of the "antis" - they are more divided and less numerous than their press support suggests.The Independent was founded 10 years ago as a firmly pro-European paper. Unless the union radically changes from within, that seems likely to mean leaving it: even John Major has flirted, however ambiguously, with the idea of a breakdown in British-EU relations.

"Renegotiate" is the code word for an entirely new relationship with the EU. The Tory anti-federalists may well lose their party the election; but I suspect they have already prevented Britain becoming a full participant in the kind of complete union planned for decades in Paris, Bonn and Brussels.Withdrawal, which only a couple of years ago was a taboo topic, is now openly discussed by Conservative right-wingers and by the hectoring classes who have signed up for Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, or the UK Independence Party. Try to imagine a Tony Blair-led government confronting the hard choices - swapping sterling for the euro, or acquiescing in more majority voting. Even if the Conservatives are in political shreds at the time, he will note the raucous and sentimental patriotism of the press and the self-righteous xenophobia aflame on the right of politics; and he will back off.

Instant historical analysis can be hilariously wrong: we should leave it a few decades to judge the effect of Britain's anti-Continental drift. But it looks as if in 1996 our political class concluded that European union, on the federal model championed by France and Germany, was not for them.That is a sweeping judgement. But the anti-Brussels fever has spread beyond the Conservative Party and infects much more than the single-currency question. What about its contents, the story of 1996? What stands out from the year, and what lessons might we draw? Politics itself has been dominated by Europe, and by the political decay of the Major administration. I have made many changes to the newspaper; and even on the law of averages, it is possible that some of them have been for the better But enough of the pottery. He took the cathedral's copy of the Magna carta, one of the four originals, with a party containing family members, to an international exhibition for six months.