Press Release - 5th June 2008

Government on the ropes in fending off referendum commitment

Global Vision says today that, while the Government continue to repeat that the Treaty of Lisbon is different in “form” from the Constitutional Treaty, it has now accepted in highly significant exchanges between the Lord President, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, and Lord Blackwell, Chairman of Global Vision, that there are only a limited number of significant differences between the resulting texts. This exposes the fundamental weakness in the arguments that the Government have put forward to fend off their referendum commitment.
The correspondence is available on Global Vision’s website (see notes to editors, note 1).   

The reality is:

• Both the Constitutional Treaty and the Consolidated EU Treaties following Lisbon are in large part made up of the text of the existing EU Treaties.

• The amendments added in to create the Post Lisbon Treaties are very largely the same amendments as were incorporated in the Constitutional Treaty. And most of the text is, therefore, the same.

• While there are a few notable differences – for example additional wording in the Freedom, Security and Justice (FSJ) protocol – these do not amount to such a significant change as to justify the claim that the two Treaties are fundamentally different.

• Indeed the Government have notably failed to directly address or rebut Lord Blackwell's observation that there are “only two articles from the Constitutional text that were not reproduced in whole or in part in the Lisbon consolidated text”. They have not contradicted the statement because the analysis they have provided actually confirms that statement.

• Against that background, the government’s claims that the Constitutional Treaty was different because it 'replaced' the existing Treaties whereas the Lisbon Treaty ‘amends’ them is playing with words to create a meaningless distinction. What matters is the content of the final resulting Treaties - not that one was presented as a series of amendments whereas the other was presented as the consolidated text with the amendments included. The Constitutional text may have been reordered and consolidated into one document, but the content is almost identical to the new EU and TEU Treaties post Lisbon - and so too are the legal and constitutional consequences.
 
Ruth Lea, Director of Global Vision, said:

“These exchanges between the Lord President, Baroness Ashton, and Lord Blackwell just show how the Government is using threadbare arguments because it is desperate to avoid a side by side textual analysis that would reveal to everyone that the Treaties are the same. If they are so confident of their case, they should simply publish that textual analysis themselves.”

Notes to editors
 
1.  The correspondence between Lord Blackwell and the Lord President, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, are a matter of public record and can be found at http://deposits.parliament.uk./ (letters at DEP2008-1400) as well as on Global Vision’s website at http://www.global-vision.net/Corres1835.htm#