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Government is smuggling through a constitution the people don`t want by an incomprehensible Bill
Austin Mitchell, Chair of the Labour Euro Safeguards Campaign, today accused the government of trying to pull a fast one by smuggling the enormous 448 article European Constitution through Parliament via five clauses of an incomprehensible Bill supposedly about the referendum. This will be the last and only opportunity for Parliamentary debate of the Constitution and its myriad provisions. It should educate and inform the public but in fact they are to be deprived of both by this backdoor manoeuvre.
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 Maastricht 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.
The Constitution itself is an enormous, almost unreadable, document of 448 articles, 36 protocols, two annexes and 50 declarations, all with the excitement and intellectual coherence of cold porridge. Yet government hasn’t yet given us its own analysis or its views on the many new provisions which have been smuggled in.
* We were told that the Charter of Fundamental Rights was unnecessary and would be opposed. Then that it would have the same legal effect as the Beano. Now even though it’s not in any of the Treaties the Charter will come into force with unknown effects which we`re not allowed to discuss.
*We were told that our own foreign policy would be unchanged but the union will have its own full-time Foreign Secretary and parts of the Royal Prerogative are being handed to it because our Foreign Secretary must impose its decisions.
*We were promised that if a third of Parliaments were against it they could refer back EU legislation. Now we learn that that can happen only if the EU does not “need” to act. That necessity will be determined by the constitution and the European Court and the Commission is free to ignore the protests.
*We were told that most of the Constitution is already in earlier treaties. Much isn`t and it also builds new powers on the back of earlier provisions. The Common Fisheries Policy which Ted Heath misguidedly accepted in1972 in his rush to get into the Common Market, has become an “exclusive competence” over the “marine biological resources of the sea”. The European Parliament`s Fishery Committee rejected this but was overruled, thus making this the first Constitution in the world to include jelly fish, seals, fish, vertebrates and invertebrates.
These and many other major changes are being presented as tinkering and “tidying up”, too unimportant for Parliament to discuss. 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.
Austin Mitchell, Chair Labour Euro Safeguards |
