It is not our powers or sovereignty that will be diminished but those of the likes of Blair and Berlusconi who wish to fashion pan-European structures solely concerned with making Europe a long-hours, low-wage, easy-sack, no benefits sweatshop to compete with India and China.ROSS WILLIAMSLONDON E11Sir: In his appearances on TV before the referendum President Chirac clearly warned the French electorate that a "No" vote would have undesired consequences. Afterwards he said that the position of France in Europe had been weakened. Just as he chastised some new members of the EU for being uppity before their accession he now needs to chastise the French for not taking his advice.How better to do so than by giving way on the Common Agricultural Policy, probably in exchange for a severe reduction of Britain's rebate? Mr. Proposals to give the European Parliament meaningful powers have been fiercely resisted.It is essential that pro-Europeans now speak out clearly and forcefully in favour of increased democracy in our Union. As a result, our leaders have fought against any attempts to develop democratic structures to hold any supra-national bodies to account. Memoir and fiction can bring it home to us with, perhaps, greater force; but only a book like Chang and Halliday's Mao can give the full picture.

And what a book: to gauge the authority of it, you only have to look at the astonishing scale of the bibliography, the huge number of people interviewed, from Chiang Kai-Shek's associates and great Western statesmen to a lady who, though now 93, had a very clear memory of what really happened at the crossing of the Dudu bridge, one of the chief fantasies of the Long March. Even so, the fact that centrally it was the story of one family left it open to ingenuous objections that her experiences might not be universal, or even typical. Unlikely as that objection might seem, she and her husband have now answered it, surely definitively, with this magnificent and shocking book.Our age has a distinct taste for memoir, for history related through personal experience. Superb as Wild Swans is, the form cannot achieve some things; clearly, Jung Chang's family was an exceptional one, and anyone with an agenda could have misrepresented their suffering as exceptional, too.The greater purpose of showing Mao's China for what it was can, in the end, only be achieved by a history. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao is an important book in ways not envisaged by most biographies. Jung Chang's first book, Wild Swans, swept the world and exposed to a large audience, for the first time, the horrific experiences many Chinese endured under Mao's reign.

We are still trapped in a destructive mindset, never mind the even-worse Americans. It's simple: if you want to get a flight, you should also have to pay the cost of the carbon debt you are building up by paying for trees in Africa.Some environmentalists call this "true cost economics": instead of only paying the market price, you also pay the environmental price for your actions This would roughly double the cost of air travel. Yes, that would be a pain, but dealing with runaway climate change will cause far more grief.It will take dozens of tough political decisions like this to fend off disaster, but whenever these ideas are put to the Prime Minister, he says they are morally attractive but "politically impossible." Can't he see this is a classic example of "rational bad behaviour"? The British government is currently making plans for a massive expansion of flight-paths and airports, and last year, this country's carbon emissions actually rose. Recriminations against Bush aren't enough: we have been living beyond our environmental means for too long as well.The long and winding road to Easter Island is far from inevitable; but every day we carry on polluting, we step further into the shadow of those dark granite statues.j.hari independent.co.uk More from Johann Hari. For example, the British government has announced that the G8 summit will be "carbon neutral": the 4000 tonnes of carbon dioxide released will be counterbalanced by the planting of trees in Africa that will absorb the same amount.It's a smart gesture, but if the Prime Minister really wants to deal with climate change, he should introduce legislation to make all our air travel carbon neutral. They even toppled some of their famous statues, symbols of the despised former chiefs And then - finally - they were left with nothing.