The EU Constitution is dead, this is just an Amending Treaty

This is the Government line, Gordon Brown used this line at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday "Let me just read from the mandate agreed at the Council:
'The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them by a single text called ‘Constitution’, is abandoned.'”. He is absolutely correct, that is what was agreed but that was because it was decided that since the EU Constitution had been rejected by those naughty real people who had been given the chance to vote; then why not drop the idea of replacing all the existing treaties with a shiny new Constitution and instead put the vast majority of the Constitution into another Amending Treaty. How outlandish, how ridiculous... Well no, take a look at this, "The new European Union Treaty has been designed to "keep the advances" of the old constitution "that we would not have dared present directly", a senior Brussels figure has admitted. Hans-Gert Poettering, president of the European Parliament and a close ally of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made the admission in a letter to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the architect of the discarded EU Constitution. Mr Poettering stressed that the new treaty, while complicated, would preserve the constitution by a different, more indirect method." The Government meanwhile are happily spinning this away as nothing to worry about and that the Constitution and the Treaty are as different as "fish and fowl" (more on that later). However Gisela Stuart, MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, a Labour MP who helped draw up the EU constitution, told the Commons it was "extremely misleading" to suggest that the Treaty gave more power back to member states than the abandoned constitution. She added "If we are so confident that it is good, we should have the confidence to ask the people."