eurealist.co.uk

Europhobia has picked up on Austin Mitchell’s Website “Government is smuggling through a constitution the people don’t want by an incomprehensible Bill”

The Bill is being rushed through before the election. Only three days are allowed for the committee stage on the floor of the House. Much of that will deal with the referendum not the Constitution. That is all the debate we will get and in it discussion will be restricted to the few selected parts of the Treaty included in the Bill.

We already knew that neither Parliament nor MPs were to be allowed to amend or change the Constitution itself because it is disguised as a Treaty, though once it’s fixed on the country with powers superior to our own Constitution and to our traditional laws and freedoms it ceases to be a Treaty and becomes a Constitution.

To add insult to that injury we are not even to be allowed to discuss the Constitution and all the new provisions it smuggles in. The carefully stage managed Maa
stricht debates look like a festival of free democratic debate compared to this exercise in obfuscation and suppression.

The European Union Bill has been presented to Labour’s strong group of Euro-sceptics as something they should support because it provides for the referendum. We are being conned because it is far more than this. The FCO Minister of State has announced that “no further legislation will be required for the enactment of this treaty”.

So Parliament rushes this Bill through, and Bingo! The Constitution which Tony Blair has already signed is in force without further discussion, if the people vote for it next year.

To facilitate this Bum’s rush we are being deprived of essential information. Government promised a commentary on the Constitution as a Command Paper in advance of Government’s second reading to be available to key opinion formers. As of now the paper hasn’t emerged. Merely 500 photocopied pages from the Commons Vote Office. Most people, even most MPs, won’t see this.

This legislative confidence trick is unworthy of a government which should listen to the views of Parliament and people and allow full and free debate in Parliament before any referendum or surrender of Parliamentary Sovereignty or British laws and freedom. You can’t win wholehearted consent by confidence tricks, half truths and closing down debate.

You can’t win wholehearted consent by confidence tricks, half truths and closing down debate.”

Exactly the point, of course this will increase the EUsceptic feelings,while supporters of the Constitution are always asking why Britain should be so anti-EU, I firmly believe it is because of the way the politicians explain what EUnity means.

This from Eursoc

However suggests some of the problems we the voters will have in deciding who is telling the truth,

Whilst the British Government always seem to playing down the effects of different parts of the Constitution others are using the same clauses to show the exact opposite.

“LATE last year European Union ministers sat down in Brussels to draft a common declaration about the new European constitution. Since all 25 EU countries are meant to ratify this document over the next two years—and as many as ten will hold a referendum on it—it seemed a useful idea to set out succinctly what the constitution does and doesn’t do. Useful: but, sadly, also impossible. The British suggested that it should be made clear that the constitution’s Charter of Fundamental Rights would not limit the rights of managers to sack workers. But the Belgians and the French objected; as far as they are concerned the charter will do exactly that. All right, said the British and others: how about making clear that the constitution puts paid to the idea of a common EU tax? Not at all, said the Belgians and other federalists, for whom the creation of such a tax remains a cherished ideal. Eventually, the ministers abandoned the whole idea of a common declaration. Each country will be left to explain the constitution to its own citizens as it sees fit.”

Or in the case of the British government use legislative confidence tricks half truths and attempts to close down the debate.