The reaction to the Irish ‘NO’ really is a European farce. Failing to get the proposed constitution through in 2005 when it was rejected by popular French and Dutch vote, its authors merely renamed it ‘treaty’ and tried again. When that, in turn, was rejected in the Irish referendum at the weekend the response from the larger European States is to bully them into holding another and presumably another until the answer is ‘yes’. It’s as if the Football Association, unhappy at England’s defeat by Croatia, insisted that the game was played again (and again) until the result went England’s way. We could still be waiting.
Unlike their Irish counterparts, the British Government grabbed the chance to renege on its election promise to hold a referendum by saying that the treaty includes, in their opinion, satisfactory changes to the rejected constitution, so removing the need to put it to the vote, apparently happy to hand over legislative decision making to unelected, faceless, fat cat, wallowing in the gravy train bureaucrats from Luxembourg and Estonia. Democracy? They fart in its general direction! Its mother was a hamster and its father smelt of elderberries!
