The Really Big Lie

Conduct worthy of Dr. Goebbels

In order to hoodwink the voters of the United Kingdom and in order cynically and deceitfully to deprive the people of the United Kingdom of their right, promised to them by the Labour Party in its manifesto for the 2005 election, to give or to withhold their whole-hearted consent to the Constitutional Treaty (which was decisively rejected by the people of France and the Netherlands in 2004 and is now reinstated almost in its entirety by the Draft Treaty Amending The Treaty On European Union and The Treaty Establishing The European Community), The Prime Minister, Ministers of the Cabinet, other Government Ministers and, to their eternal shame and utter disgrace, senior members of the Foreign Service at the Foreign Office have concocted a big lie, worthy of and such as only the Master Exponent of The Big Lie, Herr Doktor Josef Goebbels, could conceive.

The Big Lie is this:

“whilst there was a Constitution, that was rejected in 2004 by France and The Netherlands, and, as a result, the Constitution is dead and we are able to assure you of this because that is what the EU says”.

What they are careful to do is to repeat, endlessly, the mantra which appears in the Inter-governmental Conference Mandate:

The constitutional concept, which consisted of repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them by a single text called "Constitution", is abandoned.

What is true is that having a single document has been abandoned.

What they do not tell you is that there is another ‘Constitutional Concept’ which consists of introducing a Constitution for the EU so that almost all of the original single document is made part of the law of the EU by amending piecemeal two of its treaties, sometimes Article by Article, sometimes Clause by Clause, sometimes line by line and sometimes word by word. The Big Lie is that the constitutional concept has not been abandoned, merely buried in mounds of legal jargon that even former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke could be forgiven for not reading.¹

If you listen to any Minister, the mantra is what they trot out: The Constitution is abandoned.

It is, no more and no less, a bright shining well-varnished lie.

¹You may remember him: he is the individual (I forebear to use the word ‘gentleman’) who once said:

'I look forward to the day when the Westminster Parliament is just a council chamber in Europe.'

He also took perverse pleasure in telling the nation that he had not bothered to read the Maastricht Treaty, which, for a Minister of the Crown and member of the Bar (so he has no excuse for not understanding it)represents as gross a dereliction of duty as could be imagined.