The pro-euro camp are all busy congratulating themselves about having fooled the public by changing the name of the constitution.
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...
Your report misses the irony in Giuliano Amato's statement. He is on record even before the French and Dutch rejections as claiming that the Constitution needed to take account of the views of national parliaments on an ongoing basis, writing in tha FT that:
ReplyDelete‘Not only must we change the existing language of the draft constitution to grant new rights to national parliaments. We must also change the procedures and practices of the EU so that national parliamentarians feel they can contribute to the future of Europe’
Giuliano Amato (2004). ‘European unity will begin at home’. The Financial Times, May 13th.