De quoi avez-vous peur, Gordon?
L' et us step aside for a moment from the political posturing and horse-trading at the Lisbon EU summit and go back to the beginning. On 20 April 2004, Tony Blair announced to the House of Commons that there would, after all, be a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty. It is important to restate the precise reasons the then Prime Minister cited for his dramatic U-turn.
Mr Blair was emphatic that his decision did not in any sense signify a recognition that the proposals represented a fundamental constitutional change. 'The Treaty,' he stressed, 'does not and will not alter the fundamental nature of the relationship between member states and the European Union.' Set aside for a moment the accuracy or inaccuracy of that claim. Officially, the Labour government decided to endorse a referendum not because it had finally acknowledged the huge constitutional shifts implicit in the text, but because Mr Blair wanted to defeat, once and for all, the supposed myths propagated by Eurosceptics.
Again, it is worth recalling precisely what he said in 2004: 'It is all nonsense myth designed to distance people's understanding of what Europe is truly about and loosen this country's belief in its place in Europe. It has been an unrelenting, but, I have to accept, at least partly successful campaign to persuade Britain that Europe is a conspiracy aimed at us.... It is right to confront this campaign head on.... Parliament should debate [the Treaty] in detail and decide upon it. Then, let the people have the final say.' In the end, of course, the French and Dutch saw to it that the Treaty was abandoned, and the promised British referendum cancelled.
Scroll forward to October 2007, and we find that history is being rewritten. In an interview with the Today programme on Tuesday, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, gave a quite different account of the original Constitutional Treaty. Contrary to Mr Blair's claims in 2004, Mr Miliband said that 'the constitution that was signed in 2004 got rid of all previous existing EU treaties and created a new, refounding document of the European Union'. In contrast, he continued, the 2007 Reform Treaty 'does not do that, it leaves in place the existing structure and puts forward some institutional reforms'. Hence, according to the Foreign Secretary and his colleagues, no referendum is now needed.
It should be obvious that the criteria by which this government judges the need for a referendum have changed dramatically — but without any explicit admission of that change. For Mr Blair, it was the need to defeat Eurosceptic lies once and for all. But now, it seems, those alleged lies are neither here nor there. It is the character of the new Reform Treaty that counts. In 2004, the government claimed that the original Constitutional Treaty did not make fundamental changes to our relationship with Europe. Now, Mr Miliband says that the original Treaty did, after all, represent a fundamental change — but that the successor agreement does not. Which set of criteria for calling referenda should we trust?
And it is trust that is at the heart of this controversy. The European Scrutiny Committee of MPs disgraced itself on Tuesday when its chairman, Michael Connarty, implicitly compared Mr Miliband's negotiating tactics to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich. This angry exchange inevitably but regrettably eclipsed the rest of the committee's two-hour hearing.
What its inquiries have shown, at the very least, is that the government's argument is far from watertight: its members have concluded that the Reform Treaty and the Constitutional Treaty are 'substantially equivalent'. The government cites the decision in September by the Dutch Council of State, the most senior advisory body in the Netherlands, that a referendum is not necessary on the new Treaty. Against this are countless, now-familiar statements by EU politicians about the near-identity of the two Treaties. 'The substance of the constitution is preserved,' according to Angela Merkel. 'That is a fact.' In the words of Bertie Ahern, the Irish Taoiseach, '90 per cent of it is still there ... these changes haven't made any dramatic changes to what was agreed in 2004.'
Again, the government insists that the 'red lines', 'opt-ins' and braking mechanisms added since 2004 mean that the two treaties are different in content as well as form. And again, the Scrutiny Committee's work has shown how questionable these claims remain. Ministers make much, for instance, of Britain's new rights to exclude itself from Justice and Home Affairs measures: they are less comfortable discussing the new threat in the draft Treaty of unspecified 'financial consequences' if Britain pulls out of a particular measure.
The government claims, furthermore, that the Charter of Fundamental Rights does not create a single new entitlement. If that is so, why is the document necessary at all? In fact, many of the rights in the Charter are new in the sense that they have been — in Euro-jargon — arbitrarily 'deduced' from disparate case law or represent a significant widening of the European Convention on Human Rights. The government's own lawyers conceded in Tuesday's hearings that the impact of the Charter could not be fully determined before actual cases had been litigated: not much of a reassurance.
Whatever triumphs he claims to have pulled off at Lisbon, Gordon Brown would do well to return to the logic of his predecessor's Commons statement in April 2004. Trust in the government is in the gutter. The MPs charged with scrutinising European proposals do not accept its argument that the Reform Treaty is completely different to the constitutional document. The public, the media and even some of Labour's most reliable cheerleaders in the press do not believe the matter can be settled without a referendum.
If ministers feel that they have been misrepresented, then let them step up to the plate, take on their opponents and give the people a voice. What are they frightened of? As Mr Blair said three years ago: 'Let the issue be put. Let the battle be joined.'
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