wake-up call to britain
WORKERS, OCTOBER 2003 ISSUE
Two fringe meetings at this year's TUC in Brighton began the wake-up call to workers to demand a referendum on the EU Constitution and to demand a no vote in it.
The euro has not passed its five tests, nor the sixth test - the trade union movement! Following the excellent Swedish vote it now seems unlikely that the euro will be put to the people of Britain in a referendum. But the focus now shifts to the EU constitution which could smuggle the euro in through the back door as well as take away all of our national democratic control.
Undemocratic proposals originate in undemocratic processes. The proposed EU Constitution is largely the drafting of EU federalist Valery Giscard d'Estaing. He is so proud of his work that he told the current President of the EU - workers' friend Silvio Berlusconi - not to accept any amendments to the draft at the October 4th Inter Governmental Conference. The plan of the furtive convention is to get the constitution signed by governments on 9 May 2004.
Parliamentarians here think that Labour will seek to get the Constitution through parliament by spring 2005. We demand a referendum to stop them, despite the fact that the government has already ruled this out. The government says that the Constitution is no more than a tidying-up exercise and wants to lose the fundamental democratic and political questions in an obscure fog of technicalities designed to bore people to death.
But the proposed constitution is simple and profound. Its purpose is to create a new legal entity whose powers will override all national governments and which will stand above all previous European Treaties. The European Union will control the economic policies of former independent countries through the euro and a single tax system. There will be a European army and police force and a common foreign and security policy. National courts and the European Court of Justice itself will be overridden completely by EU set laws. Under an EU constitution our parliament becomes no more than a captive town hall, its agenda set by those we do not elect.
This will throw into sharp relief all of the elements of rights and relationships and common law precedents that have shaped Britain's form of parliamentary and trade union democracy hitherto. Why bother for example having a trade union link to a parliamentary party in Britain if the big cheeses are in Brussels and Frankfurt? Why vote in any parliamentary election if the winning candidate will have to beg permission for their government policies from unelected commissioners running the show in Europe?