Still Labour ministers try and mislead the public

There is a letter in today's Telegraph from Jim Murphy, I repeat it in its entirety as I believe that this overnment's deliberate disinformation campaign get as much exposure as possible:


"Christopher Booker is wrong to say the Lisbon treaty will transfer power from Parliament to the European Union (February 10). It will give national parliaments more, not less, power in EU decision-making. MPs and peers will have new powers to say whether or not EU legislation is needed and to send it back for review.

Mr Booker is also wrong to claim that the UK is alone in Europe in maintaining that the Lisbon treaty is significantly different to the defunct constitution. All 27 EU heads of state and government have agreed that "the constitutional concept is abandoned".

The Government has not "drastically reduced the time allowed to MPs for discussing the treaty": the 12 days that the Government has set aside for debate in committee stage in the Commons is the same as for the Single European Act and the Treaties of Nice and Amsterdam combined.

Jim Murphy, Minister for Europe, London SW1"


It's that second paragraph that I want to address; as I have pointed out so often before that I am getting pretty sick of it - "Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the god-father, architect, and creator of the Constitution for Europe, has declared: 'This text is, in fact, a rerun of a great part of the substance of the constitutional treaty... the public is being led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly'. He said that differences between the new treaty and the constitution 'are few and far between and more cosmetic than real'. In comparing his role here in drawing up the blueprint to that of America's founding fathers, he said the term 'constitution' had been dropped simply to 'make a few people happy'."

"Jean-Luc Dehaene MEP, the former prime minister of Belgium, noted that '95 per cent of the constitution was back'. He said it was no surprise that voters were confused: 'We drafted a treaty with a constitutional content and form. Now we have a treaty with a constitutional content without the form. But both are a treaty and neither is a constitution. The ambiguous use of words has led to misunderstandings'."

"Giuliano Amato here, the former Prime Minister of Italy, has said that the revived EU constitution has deliberately been made 'unreadable' to help fend off demands for a referendum: 'EU leaders had decided that the document to be drawn up by an intergovernmental conference should be unreadable... 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 there might be some reason for a referendum, because it would mean that there is something new.''"


Maybe the UK Select Committee on Foreign Affairs should be listened to, they said "We conclude that there is no material difference between the provisions on foreign affairs in the Constitutional Treaty which the Government made subject to approval in a referendum and those in the Lisbon Treaty on which a referendum is being denied. (Paragraph 219)"

Giscard d'Estaing has also said that "Looking at the content, the result is that the institutional proposals of the constitutional treaty … are found complete in the Lisbon Treaty, only in a different order and inserted in former treaties," He continued "Above all, it is to avoid having referendum thanks to the fact that the articles are spread out and constitutional vocabulary has been removed,"




As I said in an earlier posting, "the fact that the type of arrangement has changed does not alter the fact that the result is the same. 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."


Come on Jim Murphy, answer these points.