They deliberately made the Lisbon Treaty unreadable. I hope the Irish take note.
OpenEurope posted this on its blog in 2007:
The pro-euro camp are all busy congratulating themselves about having fooled the public by changing the name of the constitution.Breathtakingly arrogant and anti-democratic.
At a meeting of the Centre for European Reform yesterday EU officials discussed their strategy for adopting the EU Constitution without a referendum.
Former Italian PM Giuliano Amato said, “They decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception. Where they got this perception from is a mystery to me. In order to make our citizens happy, to produce a document that they will never understand! But, there is some truth [in it]. Because if this is the kind of document that the IGC will produce, any Prime Minister – imagine the UK Prime Minister - can go to the Commons and say ‘look, you see, it’s absolutely unreadable, it’s the typical Brussels treaty, nothing new, no need for a referendum.’ Should you succeed in understanding it at first sight there might be some reason for a referendum, because it would mean that there is something new.”
You can listen to them all chortling about how terribly clever they are on this clip. There is a quite lot of this kind of gloating going on in the pro-euro camp at the moment. But unfortunately for them, calls for a referendum are not going to go away.
Also posted on FaustiesBlog
5 comments:
Many British Prime Ministers have come out of treaty negotiations, and claimed the negotiation to be a victory for the British view of Europe.
Years later the opposite turns out to be the case, because the British negotiators did not fully understand all the implications of what they had agreed to.
Margaret Thatcher's rebate was one such example.
Yes she negotiated a rebate, but it turned out to be worthless.
Because every time we applied for EU funds for projects in Britain, the money was deducted from the rebate.
By the time all the calculations were finished, the rebate turned out to be no rebate at all.
The British negotiators had not understood what they were agreeing to, in relation to Britain's rebate.
The Maastrict Treaty 1992 was hailed by Prime Minister John Major as a victory for the British view of Europe.
Subsidiarity was all the talk of the day. In future powers were going to be passed back to the member states whenever possible.
But in the event the opposite turned out to be the case.
No powers were ever handed back to the member states, in fact it was the biggest hand over of sovereignty in the history of the EU.
The British negotiators did not in any way understand what was in the very complicated treaty they were agreeing to.
This so called victory, turned out to be complete and utter defeat for the British view of Europe.
All the EU Treaties from the very beginning have been extremely complicated.
It is probably true that none of the British Prime Ministers really understood all the implications of the treaties they were signing.
This was all part of a deliberate plan by he European Union, to trick British Prime Ministers into signing away British sovereignty without realising what they were doing.
None of them really understood what they were signing.
You're absolutely right, Steve Halden.
The EU call all the shots - our 'representatives' can barely catch up. It seems to me that that's the way it was designed to be.
Fausty
There may be an even bigger story hidden away in this topic, than we both realise.
The EU employs thousands of civil servants, that are continuously working away creating directives and treaties.
In fact it has been generally agree that the EU makes 80% of our laws.
Regardless of whether we are pro or anti the EU, it is logical that all these directives need to be thoroughly checked.
They need to be checked to see if they are in the interests of this country.
The fact is that time after time British Prime Ministers get tricked into signing treaties, which turn out to have a much wider scope, than we originally considered them to have at the time.
This shows there is a basic flaw in our dealings with the EU.
A small negotiating team cannot hope to match the work load of thousands of EU civil servants.
Britain needs an equally big army of civil servants, to check all the laws coming through the European Union.
This checking must be done before they get passed by the European Parliament, because by that time it is too late.
At the moment I believe they review EU Law only after is is passed.
But after it is passed it is impossible to change, so this is a waste of time.
There is a very important issue here regardless of whether we are pro and anti the European Union.
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