eurotrash
WORKERS, JUNE 2005 ISSUE
Get the story right!
At a TUC meeting debating the EU Constitution, Kinnock claimed it said nothing about "ever closer union". He's wrong. The Constitution's Charter of Fundamental Rights says "The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values."We want a referendum
On 18 May the latest Minister for Europe said Britain's referendum on the Constitution would take place whatever other EU countries decided. The same day, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw denied this, saying that it was up to the European Council to decide for us whether we should have the referendum. Straw said Britain had the legal and political obligation to ratify the Treaty through a referendum. This was wrong on two counts: one, it is a Constitution that we are being told to ratify; two, Britons can, and will, choose not to ratify it. Straw went on, "These obligations would continue unless and until the European Council makes a decision to abrogate these obligations." So according to him, the EU decides what we must do.
Abusing the holocaust
Margot Wallstrom, a vice-president of the European Commission, accused opponents of the EU Constitution of risking a return to the holocaust. She said, "Yet there are those today who want ... the EU to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin [a Jewish ghetto] and see where that road leads." The last sentence was removed from the Commission website after widespread criticism. Those comments whitewash Nazism and denigrate nations who successfully fought for their independence against it. Nazism was not an assertion of national sovereignty, but the opposite — a counter-revolutionary assault on national sovereignty.
Mandelson has the last word
Peter Mandelson recently told the Washington Post that a British 'No' vote in the referendum on the EU Constitution "will weaken me, and my role in the world." Thanks, Peter — another good reason for voting No.