Liar, fool or politician?

Dennis MacShane has written an article for The Guardian's Comment is Free section. He writes that the "European scrutiny committee of the commons on the new reform treaty is a serious document. It does not call for a referendum. It makes clear that thanks to the negotiations over the new treaty Britain will have a new relationship with Europe. It does not enter into the percentage game."
All that is true, but you can read my article of the Committee's report here for a rather fuller analysis.

Of course Denis MacShane has to then make an absurd claim, "The new treaty is 44,000 words long. The dead constitution was 157,000 words long. Unless there is a new EU mathematic directive abolishing the laws of percentages 44,000 cannot be 90, or 95 or even 50% of 157,000."
I am not sure if Denis McShane is a liar, a fool or just a politician.
I explained back in early August here, "The core of the text has 145 pages, accompanied by 132 pages of protocols and declarations. There are a total of 12 protocols and 51 declarations.

The rejected Constitution had 475 pages of text, but this document was intended to replace all EU Treaties from the past. The newly-proposed Reform Treaty merely amends the existing Maastricht and Rome Treaties, which will legally continue to exist under different names.

Think of the Constitution and Treaty as equations, don't worry this will make sense. Let us assume that the old treaties are T1, T2, T3, T4 etc. and the Constitution is C, if the new treaty is Tz and the minor differences are D. We can see that:

T1..x+Tz=C-D

According to various European bigwigs T1..x+Tz=C-D=C*0.90 or T1..x+Tz=C-D=C*0.95 or even T1..x+Tz=C-D=C*0.99"

If you are not mathematically inclined or have been taught Maths since the end of O'Levels, then think of it this way, the constitution did indeed abolish all the old treaties but it then re-enacted them with amendments and new "innovations" to make up 157,000 words. The new treaty simply amends the existing treaties and adds new components so that the end result, as a consolidated treaty, is only 157,000 words.


Denis MacShane doesn't refer to the part of the report that says "we do not consider that references to abandoning a 'constitutional concept' or 'constitutional characteristics' are helpful and consider that they are even likely to be misleading in so far as they might suggest the Reform Treaty is of lesser significance than the Constitutional Treaty. We believe that the Government must offer evidence if it is to assert that the processes are significantly different."

I presume that he also did not read this part either "Taken as a whole, the Reform Treaty produces a general framework which is substantially equivalent to the Constitutional Treaty."


Now that I have drawn Denis MacShane's attention to these two parts of the report that he must have missed, do you think he will change his mind?