EU Referendum

Showing posts with label Reform treaty. Show all posts

poland_eagle[i-poland_eagle]To nobody’s particular surprise the Polish Senate as well as the Lower House, the Sejm, has voted the Constitutional Reform Lisbon Treaty through with a 74 to 17 vote with 6 abstentions. Commission President Barroso and the Slovenian Presidency welcomed this display of European solidarity on the part of Polish politicians.

It would appear from this report in the Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza that there was a certain amount unfriendly discussion before the vote went through.

Seventy four senators cast their votes for the treaty - the Civic Platform (PO), the non-affiliated post-communist Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz, and 15 Law and Justice (PiS) senators, including deputy Senate speaker Zbigniew Romaszewski. However, there was a split in the PiS caucus, with 17 senators voting against and five abstaining (as did the non-affiliated Lucjan Cichosz).

The Law and Justice Party is that of President Lech Kaczynski, the one remaining comedian on the Polish political scene, who was there in Lisbon and negotiated, if that is what the process to be called, for Poland.

As the various negotiations between the politicians went on, some of the PiS representatives became emotional, calling on Poland’s history to give them strength:

And though no voting discipline was introduced in the caucus, following Mr Romaszewski's declaration the Prime Minister, reassured, left the Senate. And a group of clearly relaxed PO senators went for lunch to the Senate canteen. 'This means that all the votes in the PiS caucus have been counted and at least the PiS Senate committee leaders will vote yes', one of the PO senators explained to the members of the press.

During the same time, the treaty's opponents stepped forward, though they spoke without much conviction. 'This will be a new partition of Poland. The Lisbon treaty establishes a new state called the European Union and Poland will be but an administrative unit in it!' warned Ryszard Bender. At the same time, the PiS eurosceptics were obviously trying not to attack President Lech
Kaczyński who had negotiated the treaty. 'Our dear President fought bravely in Brussels as the real son of the Polish knights from Grunwald, Chocim and Vienna. But there's no certainty that the safeguards he's negotiated will work. It is not always that Poland will be governed by patriots who have God, the fatherland and honour in their hearts', said Janina Fetlińska.

It is at times like this and reading bilge of this kind that I begin to doubt my own certainty that history must be learnt at school. Not if it means that politicians produce unilluminating parallels that hide reality.

Still, an important victory was won, though it has not been widely reported. As 365Gay.com reports, a proviso was added that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is an integral part of the treaty, will be implemented without the rights it grants to gays and lesbians. On the whole, it seems unlikely that provisos like that, negotiated by the Prime Minister and the opposition are worth anything once you are implementing European legislation.

Ah well, we warned them.

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Tel+Hefferant[i-Tel+Hefferant]Not content with perpetrating the complete fiction about references to the Queen being removed from the British passport, The Daily Telegraph today awards Simon Heffer pole position on the op-ed page to lock the fantasy into the collective consciousness, his piece headed: "Let's defend our British passports".

One doesn't know whether to be more depressed at this, or at the torrent of thus ill-informed comment attached to the on-line version of the piece, with the majority of contributors taking Heffer at face value and using his rant as a platform from which to sound off about the EU.

It has come to such a pretty pass that one almost feels sympathy for Europe minister Jim Murphy, who has a plaintive little letter, tucked away on the opposite page. With commendable accuracy, he states:

There are no plans to remove any references to the Queen from future passports.

Last year, the European Commission suggested that member states' passports include additional text to remind their nationals, including Britons, that they can seek consular assistance from other member states outside the EU where they have no consular representation of their own.

This proposal has nothing to do with the Reform Treaty. We welcomed the suggestion as a good way to keep British nationals informed.

Now, you can take Murphy and his loathsome government to task for agreeing to the inclusion of the text of Article 20 in the passport (what is wrong with issuing a leaflet when the passport is issued?) but you cannot fault his factual statements.

But such simple facts, and the quest for truth and accuracy are not the fare of Heffer (or The Telegraph). In full "rant mode", Heffer launches into the EU, offering an explanation as to why – as he asserts – there "has not - so far - been an ear-splitting public outcry about the outrageous suggestion that the name of our Sovereign should be removed from the British passport."

Never once does it occur to him, one presumes, that the absence of "public outcry" stems from the rather obvious premise that his "outrageous suggestion" is not true and has no foundation in fact – even if he does concede that it has been "denied by the minister for Europe".

The trouble is that Heffer then extends his argument to include the latest developments in the metric saga. And, although he makes a few good points, he has already lost it, having been moving to the "new and hitherto unexplored region of apoplexy" at the prospect his imagined "atrocity". For goodness sake, "atrocity"?

Even then, amongst his points, it is clear that Heffer does not really understand what is going on – and has not bothered to find out. For sure, the pint has been "saved" – insofar as it applies to bottled milk and draught beer served in pubs (but not bottled beer or mixed drinks like shandy, however served), but the "EU-driven plan to force us to adopt metric measures" has not been abandoned, as he claims.

The substantive change is merely – as we pointed out yesterday – is that the commission intends to propose an indefinite derogation on the use of "supplementary indications", thus allowing (potentially) traders to include Imperial measurements alongside (but with less prominence) the compulsory metric measures.

Yet, in the fevered mind of Heffer, this is, "a victory on an awesome scale". And with that, he then extends his ignorance by conveying the myth that, "our masters have decided they don't care how we sell milk". The boring detail, however, is that the "derogation" on selling milk by the pint applies only to bottled deliveries to the doorstep. Milk in the supermarket, in non-returnable containers, must be marked and sold in metric measures.

But, upon such shaky foundations as Heffer has been able to muster, he thus stakes his claim that, with:

…many more of these "pointless" interferences in our way of life, and much more evidence of our impotence at the hands of the international unelect, and it won't be a referendum on the treaty that we will be calling for. It will be one on whether we want to stay in this oppressive and unsavoury club at all.

This may play to the masses (or Telegraph readers, which is not exactly the same thing) but such a diet of misinformation merely serves to reinforce the arguments that, if the judgement on the treaty is to be based on Heffer-like rants, there is a very good case for not having a referendum.

The stupidity of it all is that there are no end of serious, important issues relating to our membership of the EU, which could be rehearsed with as much bile and venom as Heffer could muster. On a well-founded base, his case would be unanswerable.

But, as it stands, he leaves his case open to being dismissed as an ignorant rant, which indeed it is. He does the cause no favours by so doing.

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