The Irish government has published the results of opinion research, carried out by the polling company Millward Brown IMS, into the reasons for the recent Irish NO vote on the Lisbon Treaty (a.k.a. the European Constitution). And guess what. The two key reasons why the people voted NO were that (A) they didn’t understand it; (B) they had misconceptions about it.
No one would cast any doubts on the work of a professional and independent polling organisation. But it is uncanny the way that the research found just what the Irish government — and the EU — wanted to hear.
Every so often the Brussels institutions are brought up sharp by the dissent of the people. The Danes on Maastricht. The Irish on Nice. The French and Dutch on the Constitution. And now the Irish (again!) on Lisbon — the re-heated Constitution. Brussels tries to ignore it. They try to shrug it off. Their only concession to reality is to wring their hands and say “Perhaps we haven’t done enough to explain the project to the people”. Then they vote through a budget line for more EU “information” (a.k.a. propaganda).
My own experience is that the more I explain the EU to voters, the angrier they get.
This is the EU that claims to be “a union of values based on democracy and the rule of law”. The hell it is. Their contempt for the voters is overwhelming. They are determined to ride rough-shod over public opinion, and they do so again and again. The Lisbon Treaty itself is an attempt to over-ride the French and Dutch NO votes — and there is no plan to let those countries vote again, because they would undoubtedly vote NO again.
What will they do this time? I think they are edging towards a second Irish referendum. They may strip out those elements of the Treaty that simply reaffirm parts of existing treaties. They may — if they have to — get cosmetic opt-outs on, say, defence policy or abortion rights. They may even try to slip those changes through in the Dail rather than by referendum.
But I have a prediction: if they do offer the Irish people a second chance to vote, they will get a second NO. How they will cope with that is anyone’s guess.
Myself with Prof. Fred Singer at the June 23rd climate seminar
Photo courtesy of the European Parliament
At the end of the drafting process for the failed European Constitution, after eighteen months of deliberation in Brussels at a “European Convention” of MEPs, national MPs, government and Commission representatives, the Chairman Valery Giscard d’Estaing proudly declared: “We have a consensus”. My good friend David Heathcoat-Amory MP leapt up on behalf of his beleaguered handful of sceptics (who had somehow slipped in under the wire), and declared that there was no consensus, since his group took a different view, and indeed published a minority report.
“Well”, replied Giscard magisterially, “We have a substantial majority, and that’s a consensus in Europe”.
We see rather a similar position in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are constantly told that the IPCC represents the overwhelming consensus of the 2500 scientists on its various panels. Indeed we are often told that the IPCC represents an overwhelming consensus of all scientists — despite the 32,000 scientists who have signed the Oregon Declaration, challenging the conventional alarmist view.
But not even the 2,500 IPCC reviewers have a consensus. There are constant stories of members of the IPCC panel disagreeing with its findings, but being ignored by the small and zealous group of bureaucrats and civil servants who write the “Summary for Policymakers” (which is always much more hard-line than the supporting scientific documents — but then politicians and journalists rarely read beyond the summary). One scientist actually threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reviewers’ list because he disagreed with the findings.
Two of these dissenting IPCC panellists spoke at a seminar which I hosted yesterday in the European parliament in Brussels. Fred Singer is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and used to run the US meteorological satellite service. He remarks that the IPCC accepts his corrections of their spelling, but never accepts his corrections of their conclusions. Fred was wearing the lapel-pin given to all 2,500 reviewers when the IPCC was awarded its Nobel Prize in 2007. Hans Labohm is a Dutch economist, writer and former diplomat, who was once deputy head of policy at the Dutch Foreign Ministry.
They and others have formed an alternative scientific forum, which they call the “Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change”, or NIPCC, and they presented their report “Nature, not Human Activity, Controls the Climate”. They do not dispute the data. Indeed they quote extensively from data published by the IPCC, and base their findings on that data. Their key conclusions are first, that the pattern, or “fingerprint”, of warming predicted by CO2-based greenhouse gas computer models is hugely different from the observed pattern. The models predict maximum warming in the high atmosphere (10 to 20 kms), and mainly in the tropics. Observations from both balloons and satellites show almost the opposite — most of what little warming there is, is in the northern hemisphere, away from the tropics, and at the surface. This is simply not the pattern of greenhouse warming. The CO2 hypothesis has been falsified by the data.
Second, they note that global temperatures over the short term correlate rather poorly with CO2 levels, but correlate very accurately with solar variations.
Thirdly, while long term climate records (from ice cores) show a striking correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, the CO2 levels lag the temperature by around 800 to 1000 years. Clearly, therefore, the warmists have the cart before the horse. It is not CO2 that causes warming. It is warming (driven by the sun) that causes CO2. And the mechanism by which it could do so is well understood, depending on large-scale exchanges of CO2 between the oceans and the atmosphere. These exchanges are temperature-dependant.
Hans looked at the economic and geo-political implications of climate policy, and concluded that the EU is boxing itself into a corner. It may well posture and pontificate about moral leadership, but no one much will follow. EU policies on climate will further impoverish a continent which is already slipping down global league tables for economic performance. But those policies will do nothing — literally nothing whatever — to change the earth’s climate.
The NIPCC report is available on Professor Singer’s web-site at www.sepp.org
We’ve campaigned. We’ve lobbied. We’ve marched. We’ve demonstrated (in December, you recall, I was fined £600 for demonstrating for a referendum in the Strasbourg parliament). We’ve collected signatures on petitions. We’ve printed leaflets. There have been dozens of village referendums. We’ve run “I Want a Referendum” postal ballots with stunning response rates, and 89% against the Treaty. Yet still the wretched Treaty goes on, and while the House of Lords, or the Irish Referendum, or the Poles could still put a spoke in the wheel, I’m not holding my breath.
No wonder so many on our side of the debate are spitting with frustration. We’ve won the arguments hands down, but the Treaty marches on like Frankenstein, impervious to attack. We haven’t landed the killer blow.
One man has come up with a new idea that could just work. Stuart Wheeler (a well-known Conservative supporter, and a campaigner on Europe, on climate, and human rights) is taking legal action. He is going to court to demand a judicial review of the government’s decision to deny a referendum, which he argues infringes the reasonable expectations of voters based on the government’s manifesto commitments. He has engaged a heavy-weight QC, Rabinder Singh.
We know that previous attempts to challenge the European project in the courts, based on infringement of the British Constitution, have failed. But we are advised that in this case there is some prospect of success. Even if the judicial review is not granted, it is possible that the court may criticise the government’s approach, which could have a positive effect on the Lords’ deliberations. The case is up on April 22nd (the eve of Saint George’s Day).
The problem is that litigation doesn’t come cheap, and while Stuart Wheeler deserves our gratitude for supporting the action so far, he needs our help. If you really want to know what you can do to stop the Brussels Juggernaut, here’s your chance. Send a cheque to the Stuart Wheeler Lisbon Litigation Account, at Penthouse A, 21 Davies Street, London W1K 3DE. This could just be the killer blow we’re waiting for.
Filed under: Brown, Referendum | Tags: betrayal, gordon brown, Referendum
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is guilty of a Great Betrayal over his signing of the European “Reform Treaty”, which is no more than a re-named European Constitution. The Prime Minister signed the Treaty in Lisbon last night, and it now faces a ratification process in parliament probably in the first three months of 2008.
The Treaty creates a full time President and Foreign Minister for Europe, as well as an EU diplomatic service. It gives up at least fifty British vetoes, and gives Brussels sweeping powers in new areas including energy and immigration. The Prime Minister claims to have “Red Lines” protecting British interests, but the Labour-dominated European Scrutiny Committee in Westminster has described these red lines as “leaking like a sieve”. Leading European politicians in Brussels have already declared that they will challenge the British opt-outs in the European Court of Justice, where they may well be struck down. Some have been described in Brussels as “clarifications, not opt-outs”.
The Treaty directly threatens the sovereignty of the British parliament. For the first time in our history it places our parliament under an explicit obligation to foreign institutions. Worse still it contains its own amending procedure allowing further power transfers to Brussels without limit. If this Treaty is ratified, it is the last time that parliament or the British people will have a say on new power grabs by Brussels. In future, they will take place behind closed doors in the Council of Ministers in Brussels, and Westminster will be powerless to stop them.
The Prime Minister seeks to justify breaking his referendum promise by arguing that the Treaty is not the same as the failed Constitution. But while there are technical differences, the practical effect will be exactly the same. While Brown insists that this is not a Constitution, his Spanish opposite number José Zapatero insists “We have kept all the significant parts of the Constitution … this is a treaty of a foundational character for a new Europe”. The Prime Minister also argues that the Treaty is “too complicated” for ordinary voters to understand or vote on. But governing Britain is also a pretty complicated task, yet in our democracy we trust the people to choose who should run the country. We should also trust them to decide whether to pass more powers to Europe. The refusal to hold a referendum in the face of overwhelming public demand shows a huge contempt for the British people and for democracy.
In my own East Midlands region, the village of Broughton Astley in Leicestershire is holding an official village referendum on whether we need a referendum on the Treaty. This will take place in November 1st. Broughton Astley is England’s largest village, so this will be the biggest ballot-box test of public opinion so far. Several thousand people will have an opportunity to pass judgement on the referendum question.
Gordon Brown’s Labour government was elected in 2005 on a clear Manifesto Commitment to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution. Fully 98% of current MPs made the same pledge. This new Treaty is the same in substance as the Constitution. Brown’s insistence on denying the referendum he promised, in defiance of public opinion which is 70+% in favour, is a wholesale breach of faith. His decision to deny us a referendum, to hand over the people’s democratic rights and freedoms to Brussels in the teeth of popular opposition, is a Great Betrayal. Bottler Brown chickened out of a General Election. Now he’s chickened out of a referendum. His credibility is shot.
