The EU is attempting to brand university degrees as "Made in the EU". The idea is hidden in proposals to create a European Institute of Technology (EIT), supposedly to compete in research and innovation.

The suggestion is that all universities attached to the EIT will have their degrees branded with the EIT logo. Thus any university attempting to engage in funded research via the EIT will find its degrees being awarded not by itself but by the EU.

The EIT will select businesses and universities for its "Knowledge and Innovation Communities". The EU is certain this "harmonisation" will promote enterprise and innovation and the EIT will be a success – so certain that it insists future qualifications must bear the EU logo with no reference to the universities involved.

Derek Clark MEP, of the UK Independence Party, is scathing about this latest attempt at EU self-aggrandisement: "This will not promote enterprise. It will not promote innovation. A network to match ideas and enterprise exists already –research is international."

Creating an Institute of Technology to help university research and business innovation in partnership sounds like a good idea. But that is not what is on offer. Despite the Commission's claims that the EIT will be "autonomous", the EU retains the right to cut funds or close it down if it fails to keep in line with EU policy.

The Board of the EIT will be vetted by the European Commission, with or without the advice of a four-member Identification Committee, also appointed by the Commission. Politically motivated meddling and bureaucratic interference are inevitable, almost guaranteeing the failure of the scheme.

Mr Clark said: "Ask yourself what Archimedes, Newton, Becquerel, Ehrlich, Rontgen, Fermi, Teller or Watson-Watt would have achieved if their bosses had been bureaucrats."