A Good Reason to Vote No

On Newstalk on Saturday (10/5/08), Ruairi Quinn responded to a complaint from Ulick McEvaddy about the opacity of the Treaty. He suggested that when buying a house or an airplane (UMcE has bought quite a few Boeing 707s), the "real deal" is simple but the legal document has to be complex, and that there is nothing abnormal or sinister about that.

Unfortunately, that is a misrepresentation of how we got this kind of treaty document. It is not "just one of those things" that the Treaty has been made complex. It is intentionally unintelligible. The politicans could have made it simple; they decided not to do so. "The Economist" weekly newspaper, whose Europhile credentials are impeccable, had the integrity to note this here as drafting proceeded, and again here.The titles of these articles -"Hee-hee Voters Fooled Again" and "Journalists for a Cover-up" - must make any genuine democrat's blood run cold.

Of a piece with this approach has been the extraordinary failure refusal of the EU to publish until last month a pro-forma consolidated version of the Treaties as reformed by Lisbon. Only with this consolidated version can one see what future constitution one is voting for, or against. For a very long time, the "official line" was that the right time to produce this document would not come until ratification was complete !

Just contemplate for a moment the ramifications of that stance. One - entirely fair in my opinion - paraphrase of it would be: when you have voted for it, we will let you see what it is.

The word "democracy" can be paraded as often as you like, but a Union where several units have ratified a constituent document without being able to see it in advance, cannot be validly called democratic. Hungarian legislators, for example, ratified the Lisbon Treaty three days, two of them being Saturday and Sunday, after it was signed.

If,as is still likely, I vote against the Treaty, it will be mainly because of the above.

Update on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 01:36PM by Fergus O'Rourke

To Fergal from Luxembourg: Comments are moderated. Profanity, anonymity, use of Americanised spelling (unless by Americans),and downright error, are each by and in themselves capable of provoking the Moderator into deleting a comment. That is all.

Comments

[Keith]

"The Economist...whose Europhile credentials are impeccable"

Actually, the pieces you refer to are Charlemange op-eds, which are written by a variety of guest writers, including Eurosceptics. I'm aware of at least one prominent "No to Lisbon" campaigner who has written such a column.

[Fergus O'Rourke]

Nice try, Keith, but you are almost certainly wrong. There is no sign on the relevant pages that these are Charlemagne (the original of whom may have lived in the so-called Dark Ages, but did not - surely ? he was French ! - eat and chat at the same time. His name means Charles the Great) columns. It is true that guest-writers have written for the website in question, but never anonymously. The fact that the piece had been written by a guest would have been noted and it has not been on either of these two columns. However, if you have information that proves otherwise ...