Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-10-21-Speech-3-036"
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"en.20091021.2.3-036"2
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"Mr President, there will be many important issues discussed at the European Council, but from my point of view, one of the most important is the future of the Lisbon Treaty.
Many speakers in this debate have spoken, without any apparent irony at all, of the Lisbon Treaty bringing increased democracy and accountability to the EU institutions, forgetting that they deliberately took a view that there should be no democracy or accountability in the progress of that Treaty itself. There was active collusion between the Heads of Government to avoid any referenda taking place on the Treaty lest the people were inconvenient enough to actually say they did not want it.
I listened with great interest to Mr Barroso’s comments earlier. Let me explain to him why people in the UK are so angry about this. In the 2005 UK general election, all three main political parties committed themselves in their manifestos to a referendum on the European Constitution, as it then was. It subsequently became the Lisbon Treaty, effectively the same document. In the vote in the House of Commons, two of those parties then reneged on those promises and refused people a referendum, so it is a matter of basic trust and accountability in politics. People want the referendum that they were promised. If they had not been promised it, then Mr Barroso’s comments would have been correct and there would have been the normal parliamentary ratification process in the UK.
I supported Mr Barroso in his re-election, but we do not need lectures from him about trust and accountability in politics when, at the same time, he seeks to support those who would deny people a referendum. So that, in short, is why people in the UK feel so strongly about this referendum. They look over the water to Ireland and see that the people of Ireland have been asked to vote twice on the document when we have been denied the possibility to even vote once. You cannot, on the one hand, argue that it will bring increased democracy and accountability to the EU whilst, at the same time, denying the electorates of the EU any say whatsoever on this document."@en1
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