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Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan writing in the Telegraph 

Two years from now, the European constitution will be in force. The Eurocrats have worked out a deft way of getting around them. Around 85 per cent of the text can, with some creative interpretation, be implemented this way.

True, there are one or two clauses that will require a formal treaty amendment: a European president to replace the system whereby the member nations take it in turns to chair EU meetings; a new voting system; legal personality for the Union.

These outstanding items will be formalised at a miniature inter-governmental conference, probably in 2007. There will be no need to debate them again: all 25 governments accepted them in principle when they signed the constitution 17 months ago.

We shall then be told that these are detailed and technical changes, far too abstruse to be worth pestering the voters with.

The EU will thus have equipped itself with 100 per cent of the constitution, but without having held any more referendums. Clever, no?

Hannan implores us “Don’t take my word for it: listen to what the EU’s own leaders are saying.”

Wolfgang Schüssel,  "The constitution is not dead."

Angela Merkel,     “We are willing to make whatever contribution is necessary to bring the constitution into force."

Dominique de Villepin,  “France did not say no to Europe."

Hannan makes the point that even our own “Europe minister, Douglas Alexander, repeatedly refused to rule out pushing ahead with the bulk of the text without a referendum.”

But “For the purest statement of the Eurocrats’ contempt for the voters, however, we must turn to the constitution’s author, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

"Let’s be clear about this," pronounced Giscard a couple of weeks ago. "The rejection of the constitution was a mistake that will have to be corrected."

Although after the French and Dutch rejection the ratification process was halted in order to prevent a domino affect, and a period of reflection was called, Hannan makes the point that “Since the French and Dutch "No" votes, three countries have approved the text and three more - Finland, Estonia and Belgium - look set to follow in the coming weeks, which would bring to 16 the number of states to have ratified.”

It is therefore clear that those who would suggest that the constitution is dead, are simply not looking at the evidence. 

“The European Commission has launched a massive exercise to sell the constitution to the doltish national electorates.

Their scheme goes under the splendidly James Bondish title of "Plan D". I forget what the D stands for: deceit, I think, or possibly disdain.”

“While all this is going on, the EU is proceeding as if the constitution were already in force. Most of the institutions and policies that it would have authorised are being enacted anyway: the External Borders Agency, the European Public Prosecutor, the External Action Service, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Defence Agency, the European Space Programme.

The text is not, as the cliché of the moment has it, being "smuggled in through the back door"; it is swaggering brazenly through the front.”

Being fair to the "Project" Hannan says it has always advanced in this way. “First, Brussels extends its jurisdiction into a new field of policy and then, often years later, it gets around to regularising that extension in a new treaty.

This, indeed, is how the EU was designed. Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval.

So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.

Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic in that many commissioners, à la Patten and Kinnock, have been explicitly rejected by the voters.

In swatting aside two referendum results, the EU is being true to its foundational principles.”

Of Britain’s stance Hannan says “we are carrying on as though the French electorate had killed off the constitution, and so spared us from having to think about the European issue at all.

Once again, we are fantasising about the kind of EU we might ideally like to have, rather than dealing with the one that is in fact taking shape on our doorstep. Will we never learn?”

Well many of us have already learnt, but Douglas Alexander, repeated refusal to rule out pushing ahead with the bulk of the text without a referendum, is a clear indication that our elected representatives do not share our views. I do not for one second belive that people like Alexander cannot see what is  happening across the channel, they simply do not want an open debate until it is too late. Which fact flags the real problem, it is not the EU, the problem starts at home, we have our own political elite who are more concerned with keeping in with their Continental colleagues in the European project, than  they are for truly representing the wishes of the British people. 

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