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Saturday 30 August 2008

Leading article

De quoi avez-vous peur, Gordon?

Tony Blair promised a referendum on the EU constitution to defeat 'Eurosceptic myths'. Is Gordon Brown afraid of such a contest?

What its inquiries have shown, at the very least, is that the government’s argument is far from watertight: its members have concluded that the Reform Treaty and the Constitutional Treaty are ‘substantially equivalent’. The government cites the decision in September by the Dutch Council of State, the most senior advisory body in the Netherlands, that a referendum is not necessary on the new Treaty. Against this are countless, now-familiar statements by EU politicians about the near-identity of the two Treaties. ‘The substance of the constitution is preserved,’ according to Angela Merkel. ‘That is a fact.’ In the words of Bertie Ahern, the Irish Taoiseach, ‘90 per cent of it is still there ...these changes haven’t made any dramatic changes to what was agreed in 2004.’

Again, the government insists that the ‘red lines’, ‘opt-ins’ and braking mechanisms added since 2004 mean that the two treaties are different in content as well as form. And again, the Scrutiny Committee’s work has shown how questionable these claims remain. Ministers make much, for instance, of Britain’s new rights to exclude itself from Justice and Home Affairs measures: they are less comfortable discussing the new threat in the draft Treaty of unspecified ‘financial consequences’ if Britain pulls out of a particular measure.

The government claims, furthermore, that the Charter of Fundamental Rights does not create a single new entitlement. If that is so, why is the document necessary at all? In fact, many of the rights in the Charter are new in the sense that they have been — in Euro-jargon — arbitrarily ‘deduced’ from disparate case law or represent a significant widening of the European Convention on Human Rights. The government’s own lawyers conceded in Tuesday’s hearings that the impact of the Charter could not be fully determined before actual cases had been litigated: not much of a reassurance.

Whatever triumphs he claims to have pulled off at Lisbon, Gordon Brown would do well to return to the logic of his predecessor’s Commons statement in April 2004. Trust in the government is in the gutter. The MPs charged with scrutinising European proposals do not accept its argument that the Reform Treaty is completely different to the consti­tutional document. The public, the media and even some of Labour’s most reliable cheerleaders in the press do not believe the matter can be settled without a referendum.

If ministers feel that they have been misrepresented, then let them step up to the plate, take on their opponents and give the people a voice. What are they frightened of? As Mr Blair said three years ago: ‘Let the issue be put. Let the battle be joined.’

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