Referendum News

Authors of New Treaty Say It is the Same As the Old One

If you want to understand the issue as to whether the document signed by Vanity Blair at the fag end of his Premiership which The Weasels try to call a Reform Treaty or an Amending Treaty or whatever dishonest name that they give to it to conceal its true identity, is or is not a wholesale revival of the EU Constitution, you do not have to listen to or read the critique of Eurosceptics, though we earnestly hope that you will.

Instead it is enough to listen to or to read the musings of those people who work so hard to ensure that the Constitution is adopted, especially those who are working so hard to deny the British people the right to give or to withhold their whole-hearted consent to this Treaty which will put an end to a thousand years of independence for these islands.

So another group of the EuroNabobery has given its view. This is a shadowy group called the Action Committee for European Democracy, a cabal of European Federalists who have been hard at work devising a replacement document for the Constitution which was so decisively rejected by the peoples of France and The Netherlands (and would have been equally decisively rejected by the people of the UK).

Who are the members of this Camarilla? Well, some are well-known faces, others less so. Jean-Luc Dehaene will be remembered not so much as the former Prime Minister of Belgium (after all, who would want to keep the names of former Prime Ministers of that country at their finger tips) but as the candidate of a Franco-German stitch-up for Presidency of the European Commission. So Federalist was he that John Major was moved to one of the few moments of decisiveness of his Premiership when he decided to veto Dehaene’s elevation.

Wim Kok is a former PM of the Netherlands, and a committed European. Chris Patten is a former European Commissioner, last Governor of Hong Kong, failed Conservative politician and notorious Europhile. Two are European Commissioners: Margot Wallstrom, EU Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication Strategy (which means that she is in charge of the all the obfuscation and spin designed to pull the wool over the European public’s eyes about the true nature of Le Grand Projet) and the other is Danuta Hübner, Polish EU Commissioner for Regional Policy (her portfolio is one which attracts the particular attention of those who want to halt the onward march of Federalism as it that which would divide Europe into a whole set of new regions, many of which transcend national borders, which, of course, will soon disappear if they get their way). Guiliano Amato, its Chairman, is a former PM of Italy.

The rest are a motley assortment of used Euro politicians and one academic. All are committed to the Constitution. In June 2007 they issued a Declaration on the process of getting the Constitution back on track. In it they cannot bring themselves to mention the French and Dutch Referenda which rejected the Constitution, instead referring to them as “drawbacks that have led to a period of reflection”: how’s that for a lemon-sucker’s weasel words!? Why should they bother to acknowledge these painful Waterloos when they are going to ignore the results anyway?

This group has been at the heart of the process of coming up with a document which preserves all the important changes and wholesale transfers of power so earnestly desired by the Federalists and turning it into something which can be passed off as innocuous. The document signed up to by Vanity Blair in June is essentially their document (or rather documents: part of the deceit has involved splitting the Constitutional Treaty Mark I into a series of protocols and reforms of existing treaties that are largely unintelligible when read separately and which only the sterling work of such as OpenEurope and EU Referendum has enabled people to comprehend amount to a complete reinstatement of Mark I) and they are very very pleased with their handiwork. So pleased, that they have been unable to contain their hubris at the bowdlerized Constitutional Treaty Mark II:

“The proposed new treaty and supplementary protocols take over almost all the innovations contained in the constitutional treaty. They only leave aside the symbolic changes which were introduced by the constitutional treaty – such as the title of the treaty or the symbols of the union.”

So there you have it: forget about whether the new treaty is 90% the same as the original or 98%. For the Amato Group only the cherry on the cake has been removed to leave the cake 99.9999% the same as before. The people charged with writing the replacement say, in terms that even a dishonest Labour Minister may find hard to evade, Constitution Mark II is the same as Constitution Mark I

Yet the Government and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office continues to insist that the new treaty is something completely different from the Constitutional Treaty. One doubts, in the face of all the evidence, all the outside comment and, if they have bothered to do so, a casual reading of the document, that they actually believe this, but repeat it at nauseam they do.

Of this big lie, more anon.