Attempts to Avoid EU Referendum Are Pure Humbug

The ‘constitutional concept’ has been ‘abandoned’? Well, so says the UK Government when pressed for a British referendum on the EU’s Reform Treaty, the successor to the ill-fated EU Constitution.

Both the Constitution and Reform Treaty have been designed to introduce the ‘innovations’ resulting from the 2004 IGC into the operation of the EU.

The Constitution did so by replacing the constitutive EU treaties with a new text.

The Reform Treaty does so by amending the constitutive EU treaties.

Both have had the same purpose, and each have been intended to provide the EU with the same powers, institutions, and status.

If the Reform Treaty is intended to produce much the same result for the EU as was the Constitution treaty, what is the justification for refusing the British people a referendum now?

To pretend that the precise means by which each treaty acts is different is pure humbug, because the substantive result, and so the import for the British people, is the same in each case.