Speaking in the European Parliament on the 11th March 2015,  David Campbell Bannerman, MEP for the Eastern Counties warned that an EU army would have been used in the Ukraine and thousands of troops lost ‘in a futile exercise to prove that the EU is a powerful empire.’ The MEP stated that the plan was ‘profoundly dangerous’ and would divide both NATO and the EU.   He asserted that the true purpose of the defence cuts across Europe is to ‘destroy our national ability to act independently so we have no alternative but to pool and share’ in the common European army .  He finished by saying that the dangerous plan must be ‘stopped in its tracks.’