Just days ahead of the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday next week, David Miliband will on Monday deliver a speech at the IISS in London, entitled "EU Foreign Policy After Lisbon".
Will he make a subtle candidacy bid for the EU Foreign Minister role to be created under Lisbon?
Who knows - but one thing is for sure - this speech should have come not in October 2009, just weeks before the Treaty is due to come into force, but in Spring 2008 when Parliament was voting on whether or not to ratify it, and nobody had the foggiest what EU foreign policy would look like under Lisbon. Or better still even earlier, when the Treaty was still being written and negotiated, so that citizens could actually take an interest and find out what was being decided in their name. Instead, Miliband will next week present us with a fait accompli.
2 comments:
"so that citizens could actually take an interest and find out what was being decided in their name"
And what could the citizens have done about it?
Part of the reason MPs and Lords felt they were able to get away with rubber stamping this Treaty without giving voters a say was the sad fact that they simply weren't hearing about it enough on the doorstep - they weren't being bombarded with angry letters from constituents and they obviously felt they could get away with it.
Those people who do know what is in the Lisbon Treaty have managed to make an impressive amount of noise, but if people (including the media) had woken up to this Treaty long before it was even written and presented to Parliament for signature, then we would have been able to make far more - and the Government would not have found it quite so easy to push this thing through Parliament.
Seems simple to us.
Your question suggests a certain defeatism, which we don't share. Those in favour of 'ever closer union' want you to believe it is inevitable - let's not join them, or they will be proved right :-)
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