Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-10-Speech-3-042"
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"en.20071010.16.3-042"2
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"Mr President, I want to thank the Council and Commission for their statements. The Lisbon informal summit is going to be a crucial event, having had the publication of the draft Reform Treaty, which heads of state and government will focus on when they meet there. But the IGC process has been rushed too much. Indeed, the British Government says it has only had two days to consider the draft mandate. The proposals are, of course, as has been said by other speakers, very much the same as those contained in the original constitutional text.
The British Prime Minister has a problem. It is called trust – trust in what he says. For the past few weeks, he has encouraged his Ministers to talk up prospects of an election in the UK and then, when the political going got rough, he backed down. I think his European colleagues, fellow European leaders, should be very careful that whatever he says in Lisbon, he is likely to mean something completely different. British Conservatives, of course, will continue to demand a referendum on the Treaty. The vast majority of British people want one, including most of the Government’s own supporters. If the Prime Minister continues to resist that pressure, despite a clear election manifesto pledge, then the British people will have further confirmation that he cannot be trusted. The leader of my party said that this could well be a blatant breach of trust – one of the greatest and most blatant breaches of trust in modern politics.
I do also wish that Europe would concentrate more on the paths of globalisation, alleviating world poverty and tackling climate change. These are the lessons that we should, by now, have learnt. I hope that our Prime Minister will be straight with the British people on the issues that arise at Lisbon. We want a successful Europe, but it must be a Europe that concentrates on the things that people really do support and understand."@en1
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