David Cameron has just ratted on his much trumpeted commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. The argument that the Treaty is now ratified, does not in fact preclude a referendum. It is perfectly possible to resile from an international treaty; a referendum on whether to resile would be perfectly feasible, but Cameron has not the stomach for that fight with the EU.
To cover his retreat he unleashed a cloud of rhetorical proposals which have no pactical effect. A “referendum lock” law covering future treaties could simply be undone by any future government, but more practically would be unlikely to be invoked as the Lisbon Treay is designed to allow for amendment, to obviate the need for ratification of further treaties or formal ratification of the amendments,
But more importantly, the “Sovereignty Law” is a non-starter. If it had any meaning, it would require us to resile from the Lisbon, Nice, Amsterdam and other treaties in which sovereignty was given up (or “pooled”, as pro-EU jargon has it,) We cannot simply declare that the UK courts are not subject to the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights, or that the British govenment is not bound by the majority voting provisions of successive EU treaties, without resiling from the treaties that say otherwise. And if we are prepared to do that, the whole argument for not having a referendum on Lisbon fails.
The pretence that the German Constitutional Court sits above the European Court of Justice is a shameful lie. The German Constitutional Court has in fact never tried to strike down a ECJ ruling, a European Commission ruling, or an EU treaty provision. The Cameron ploy is not so much smoke and mirrors, as an effort to hide in a steaming heap of bullshit.
I do not for one second think he believes it himself.
It seems that Cameron is just a shifty snake oil salesman like Blair. Now there’s a shock.
Who to vote for?
UKIP?
Of course he doesn’t believe it. I would think he never had any intention whatsoever to hold a referendum. It was just a ploy to make it look as if the two parties have a separate agenda but in reality both parties act as the mouthpiece of the elite/deep government. The wishes of the people are only served when this entity has its back against the wall
“Who to vote for?”
As if it matters. What passes for democracy these days is nothing but a periodic mass blank-cheque writing exercise.
Vote tactically, against any overall majority.
Craig,
Can you explain exactly how it is possible to resole from the Lisbon treaty? Will it be possible to go back to the position we are in today, and somehow abolish the new voting rights, EU president etc??
And nothing about Brown who broke a manifesto commitment while in government.
My feelings towards the Lisbon Treaty, and the actions of the two main parties towards ‘European Integration’, cannot easily be put into words.
So instead, I’ve put them into song – ‘Gee Mister Barroso’.
Apologies to Mr Bernstein.
D
Thatcher sold the pass when she signed the Maastricht Treaty.
There is only two parties who are left to vote for: the BNP and UKIP, all the others are either toadies or greenies.
Thanks a lot but, personally, I’d rather vote Green than for a bunch of fascists or little englanders as alternatives to the three bankster parties!
Thanks for explaining these things.
Isn’t it odd that the supporters of the “nationalist” parties never seem to have learned English grammar?
Or should I have written “seem never”?
The best thing is not to vote at all. If nobody voted then those who actually rule us would have to reveal themselves. Then we would know who we have to fight to regain democracy.
I agree. Cameron, no offence to Craig’s little boy, or indeed to David Cameron’s little boy, is an eye-stinging cloud of fresh manure ammonia.
If you made a pile of Royals, greedy M.P.s, overpaid vicars, feminists, MI5 agents, T.V. executives, and old and new money horse-owning, landed millionaires together, and rotted them thoroughly for six months, you couldn’t produce the same whiff of utter hypocrisy as comes off David Cameron.
That’s because he is the heir to the mess created by Mrs Thatcher which created the banking crisis we are now in. The idea that he or his party have any solutions to our problems is laughable. I would rather be led by Zionist EU President Blair.
Ruth,
we’ll never get absolutely everyone to stop voting; if only five percent vote, some party will still claim a victory. But there might be enough of us to trade each side off against every other; could that help to illuminate the matter?
I’m not sure what the problem here is with the ‘treaty’.
I’m not an anarchist by any stretch of the imagination, but of course we could terminate – easy as blinking. Easy as breaking any other contract. History is littered with broken treaties.
It really IS that simple, despite all the hysterical maunderings of self-important Eurotroughgrubbers. We’d just have to stop playing and take our ball back (and the net c.£1.8million/hr that the EU soaks from our pockets every single hour, every day of every year).
Of course there’d be Consequences.
EU diktators would paranoidally go into overdrive banning this, that and the other British produce, refusing entry to Brits, imposing financial penalties that would, of course, be impossible to wholly recoup…
But we’d get over it. So would they.
We may even emerge a much stronger nation. History also shows that the creation of very large conglomerations of formerly sovereign/autonomous states debases the individual states and the whole crumbles sooner or later. The newly liberated sovereign states struggle free, experience a period of cash-strapped reconstruction and then a halcyon period of wealth…until the next empire-builder comes along and starts the whole inane process all over again.
Humans never learn.
We also never learn that lying politicians are as inevitable as death’n’taxes.
PS Welcome home, Craig. Missed your sanity…
Good melancholic post Sam, but the economic, globalised wilderness out there might just leave us adrift with nowhere to go. I cannot see NAFTA opening its arms ever more for british interests.
Can you see efficiency drives and modernisation in the manufacturing sector we have got left? You rightly assume that the doors/markets in Europe would slowly shut with increasing animosity, which would hurt us more than Europe.
If European companies pull out of british operations, remember the ten french nuclear power stations and air craft carrier, the beloved ‘yuk’ perrier water, etc. Landrover, even japanese manufacturers, who have used Britain as a base to cut into the European car market might want to move to a more Europe friendly place.
Cameron lives in dreamland and would instigate a massive loss of finacial power should he withdraw from Europe, something the UKIP and BNP have not grasped, their economics stop with the MEP’s wage they are drawing, they have no other economic structure to offer, all platitudes and nothing behind it.
David is angry that he’s limping behind and has cut his own throat by leaving the EPP. By joining the homophobes and nazi sympathisers in Europe he has placed himself next to UKIP and BNP, he is counting on the ineptness of the british public when it comes to Europe, if there would be more knowledge about how Europes work, this little islander feeling would slowly dissapate and open peoples eyes.
The media and politicians have never regarded Europe as important as it really was, rather than pulling the bull by the horns, they merely kept hanging on to the tail since thatcher joined the melee.
Re negotiating the 1972 communities treaty would be regarded as sabotaging the basis of the EU and result in bad blood, exactly what the USA would like to see.
Add to this a new world currency, well past the drawing board as China, Russia, France and many other Arab as well as European countries are well advanced in talks, who knows it might even be the Euro, and you have a recipe for economic collapse rather than freedom from the bad dictators of Europe.
Who to vote for? I say it again, only an organised likeminded group of Independents would make a real difference to the worn out, I do not think that we will ever get a voting system that is fair so these wo/men would need to do it under the well past the post system, which means preparing NOW.
Sovereignity has died when a US drone killed 4 suspected terror subject in yemen, it is one of the most overvalued, but hollow terms and it is something that will disappear in a world that needs cooperation, on energy projects like desertec and on many other cross broder environmental matters, incl. global warming.
That much said, I do not support the top down unaccountable set up, appointed commissioners and vested interests will carry on running the EU as they see fit, but and here lies the crux, the EU has united Europe, it has not gone to war to do it and it has given us the longest possible period of prosperity open trade and peace, ever.
Beat that for an unaccountable rabble.
forgive my typos, I’m not about to join the knuckledusters.
Sod the lot of them…Tory’s,NuLabour,LibDems,Greens etc..
They’re all just puppets for the New World Order.
The illusion of choice and difference.
Clark I’d rather be a little Englander than in a country that is largely responsible for the deaths of millions in other countries. We all come to this blog because Craig is a supporter of human rights and against the wars in Afganhistan and Iraq but the fact is the BNP, UKIP and Greens are the only parties that have expressed policy against interventionist wars.
Has anyone been to Norway? Lovely little country, strong currency, strong ecomony, higher living standards than most countries in the continent. Are they part of the EU? No.
Don’t believe the BS that our country is stuffed without the EU, this is scaremongering.
If trying to cling on to some small measure of democracy and self-determination for the inhabitants of this island means being a “little Englander” then bring it on. Far better surely than being some powerless, dispensible consumer-slave in a global fascist super-state. Is that what you want? ‘Cause that’s what’ll ‘appen.
People like Bill amaze me. If the BNP have got you fooled into thinking that they in any way represent an alternative that is because they are lying to you. UKIP are admittedly not a racist party built on admiration for the Nazis, anti-semitism, violence and hatred, but the thought of an alliance between the two is indeed unholy. And yet that is where we are heading. Have you seen the death threats against journalists who report on the English Defence League – the natural offshoot of the BNP? Has anyone? Bill, why on earth would you openly espouse politics which rely on hatred, threats and violence? And there’s no point arguing that New Labour are just as bad. Given a choice between a rotten apple and a rotten tomato, why would you argue for either?
The interesting fact is that no one bothered to question why Cameron had promised a referendum at the time when the decision not to have a referendum anyway had already been taken by the government,so what was he playing at?
No doubt a totally unsubstantiated and populist promise from its inception,but how come nobody in the press pointed this out before?
So now we have William Hague saying “yes well we can’t have a referendum now since the treaty has been ratified”,yeah,doh!
Anarchism is the best answer to the depravity of society. Let’s demolish the state and live a natural, fulfillig life in eqality and peace.
Social justice will never come through sham democracy and elitist domination.
sorry for the typo.. equality
It’s quite interesting today being 5 November that the state was up to the same tricks so long ago: setting up a group of ‘conspirators’ to commit an act of terrorism to demonise the Catholics.
I agree with you, Ingo, that we need to co-operate on all manner of cross-border issues.
The problem is the EU is based on the old paradigm of ultra-capitalist competition, not on co-operation. Its roots are in the protectionism of the European coal and steel industries against the rest of the world.
Many of the issues we need to co-operate on globally are not amenable to and not truly resolved by capitalist ways of doing things. There’s me sounding like a rank socialist! I’m not.
But the practice of democracy never sat well with the needs of a relative few to feather their own nests. The way the EU has been set up and the way we have been so undemocratically bounced into this unpopular union is a glaring example of the relative few at work.
I fear we’re at a defining moment in history. Either we’ll reject the parties who peddle the EU’s lack of democratic accountability and start to take back our sovereignty or we’ll roll over and accede to what’s likely to be a decreasingly benign dictatorship as incomes and services are cut and the natives get restless.
Either way, we’re going to have to address the essential issues facing our planet sooner or later. Doing it the undemocratic EU way is, in my humble opinion, not going to work for more than a century. Any venture that is based on false premises is setting itself up for failure. But, hey! the relative few are getting very rich of the back of it all just now!
And talking of economic collapse, if the UK were a PLC, we’d be trading illegally now. EU or not, we’re headed for financial destitution anyway according to the IMF if we don’t mend our ways pronto. Trouble is that the IMF has a typically ultra-capitalist (hence unsustainable) fix: drastically reduce the ‘free’ NHS and cut people’s state pensions.
We have to cease all this runaway global competition in whatever guise it appears/massive bloc protectionism and start genuinely co-operating.
Tch. And now I’m sounding like a G20 protester. I’m not. I’m just saying what I believe to be some common sense home truths….the EU isn’t going to fix anything.
TC_ I did not put forward support for any party in my previous post, for the record – I loathe the BNP and I don’t for one minute think they represent any kind of worthy alternative.
However, its ironic that in these times people can crticise a party like the BNP for their fascist views but still go and vote for a party that would continue the slaughter of innocent people in other countries.
Apologies if I’m coming across in the wrong way I’d just like to support a party who will do the right thing by ending the wars and saving lives. That for me comes above all else.
TC_ I did not put forward support for any party in my previous post, for the record – I loathe the BNP and I don’t for one minute think they represent any kind of worthy alternative.
However, its ironic that in these times people can crticise a party like the BNP for their fascist views but still go and vote for a party that would continue the slaughter of innocent people in other countries.
Apologies if I’m coming across in the wrong way I’d just like to support a party who will do the right thing by ending the wars and saving lives. That for me comes above all else.
@Sam
You write that the EU is an unpopular union but there are now 27 Member States with other countries anxious to join.
Isn’t the way that Member States pool their sovereignty a good example of the co-operation you appear to promote? If not, perhaps you could describe the form of co-operation you have in mind and how this would tackle many of the global issues which you claim are insoluble by capitalist ways.