Ireland says No
WORKERS, JULY 2008 ISSUE
Not for the first time the people of Ireland have spoken for the peoples of Europe, rejecting the EU's Constitutional Treaty by 53.4 to 46.6 per cent.
Only the four million Irish, of the EU member states' 490 million people, have been allowed to vote on the Treaty. Even then, it took a legal challenge to force the Irish government to hold a referendum. But then, that is down to their democratic national constitution, which the Treaty is designed to override!
Will Brussels accept this No? After the French and the Dutch voted down the Constitution in 2005, the EU overruled the express wishes of the peoples of Europe for more referendums. It may try again. But the high turnout gives them a problem.
Even before the vote, Green MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit criticised the "foolishness" of the Irish referendum, and said that those thinking of voting no in Ireland were "selfish". What about the selfishness of Europe's rulers, who say that only they have the right to vote on their countries' future? Let's count up the votes: a majority of 110,000 in Ireland, and not a sixth of that number voting in Europe's parliaments.
The EU's cheerleaders call the Irish voters "ignorant", but if people don't know what is in a treaty, they are foolish to embrace it. The Irish saw it was not in their own interests, and refused to be blackmailed into voting for it.
The Irish establishment – the three main political parties, the media, the Pope, even the Irish Farmers Association in a shady last-minute deal – all pushed for a Yes vote. They reasoned that if they were all united, then workers must surely trust them on how to vote. The opposite happened, and the people listened to their own instincts, backed up by Irish trade unions and Sinn Fein.
The EU's leaders are still stuck with a rule that their treaties can only be valid if they are ratified unanimously. The Lisbon Treaty was designed to do away with that, wiping out national sovereignty so that individual nations could be forced to do what Brussels wants. The Treaty allows them to change their laws as they wish, with no reference ever again to peoples or even to national parliaments.
So in theory the Treaty falls. But, in spite of the Irish vote, the EU – with a fascist abhorrence of democracy – will seek to impose it. To those who ask what part of the word "no" they don't understand, the answer is "everything".
Workers in all the EU's member nations must now make the EU inoperable: we must not comply with its Directives, not participate in its institutions, not fund it, and never vote in its toytown elections. We should all demand referendums now – or organise them ourselves.
The EU is an enemy occupier and we must treat it accordingly. We must withdraw all support from the EU, as preparation for dumping it altogether. We need a new democracy, a new nationalism, a national liberation to free Britain from this increasingly dictatorial EU. The Irish have changed everything.