Irish 'No' Vote Architect Plans Europe-Wide 'Referendum' On Lisbon Treaty

The man who delivered an historic "No" vote in Ireland against the EU's Lisbon Treaty has revealed far-reaching plans to give voters throughout Europe a peoples' referendum on the handover of power to Brussels.

By Tim Shipman

Declan Ganley is planning to field more than 400 candidates in next June's European Parliament elections, in the 26 countries – including Britain – where voters have had no direct say on the treaty.

The energy and rhetoric of Mr Ganley, a multimillionaire businessman, was widely credited with persuading the Irish to reject the treaty, even though every leading Irish political party apart from Sinn Fein was urging voters to say "Yes".

Now he wants to give British voters a chance to deliver a bloody nose to both the Brussels establishment and to Gordon Brown, whose party first promised and then refused a referendum in Britain.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Ganley disclosed that he was starting to raise £75 million from online donations to run candidates in all 12 of Britain's European Parliament constituencies, and in seats throughout the EU.

He will turn his pressure group, Libertas, into a party with just one policy: to fight the Lisbon Treaty, which many see as the rejected European Constitution by the back door.

"We will tell people that Libertas is the box you put your X in if you want to vote 'No' to the Lisbon Treaty. It's clear, it's simple," he said.

"The message will be: we are now giving you a referendum and it's going to take place in June of next year at the European elections.

"People across Europe will have the chance to send the same resounding clear message that Brussels cannot continue with this treaty that the Irish people have rejected. For this to provide a meaningful opportunity for this to be a referendum, you'd have to run at least 400 candidates across Europe."

Mr Ganley spoke as the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, prepared for a visit to Ireland to assess the fall-out from June's rejection vote. The French leader, who will arrive in Dublin tomorrow, is a key supporter of the treaty and has already infuriated Irish euro-sceptics by suggesting that they "will have to vote again". Yesterday Mr Sarkozy said he would listen to Irish objections to the treaty, but added that the views of the 23 countries that had adopted the treaty already could not be overlooked.

Mr Ganley has previously flirted with the idea of expanding his campaign. But he has never before disclosed his ambition to run so many candidates in what could in effect be a Europe-wide "people's referendum" on the treaty.

He accused Mr Brown of ratifying the document without the referendum Labour once indicated it would offer: "It's not just undemocratic, it's anti-democratic," he said.

"It's an absolute disgrace that the British Government offered a referendum and then took it away. Power belongs to all the citizens of the UK and you loan that power on the condition that it is used wisely. You don't lend it to politicians to give away to someone who never has to ask you for a vote. That is what Gordon Brown has just done in just ratifying this treaty."

His plans will unsettle the Brussels establishment, which was at first dismissive of his efforts and then humiliated by his success in Ireland.

Mr Ganley, 39, made his fortune in the telecoms industry, but now runs Rivada Networks, a defence contractor with offices in Ireland and America, which supplies emergency response equipment to the military. A devout Catholic and teetotaller, who is said to work 18-hour days, he was born in London to Irish parents, but has returned to his family's roots in Co Galway, where he now lives in the former home of the folk singer Donovan with his American-born wife Delia and four children.

Mr Ganley said that campaigning on a single issue would enable voters to deliver "a clear, unequivocal message" that Europe's elites would not be able to misinterpret. In the past, EU leaders have claimed that "No" votes on the constitution in France and the Netherlands were the consequence of domestic political issues.

Mr Ganley hopes to win more than 80 seats in Strasbourg, creating a Europe-wide voting bloc which would have a strong mandate to block passage of the treaty. "There's no national party that can provide that sort of punching power in the European Parliament. The voters will have mandated candidates to go in and ensure that there will be no attempts to resuscitate the Lisbon Treaty."

Unlike many Tory eurosceptics, Mr Ganley says he supports the European Union but objects to the 287-page treaty document – which he says is far too long and complicated to be comprehensible.

"What Price Democracy, Mr. Sarkozy?"

Nigel Farage is one of the most articulate and impressive young leaders in Britain. He is a founder of the eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party, and a member of the European Parliament for South East England. We're unabashed anglophiles here at Sunlit Uplands, and we think you will see in the following exchange between Farage and French President Sarkozy, how freedom loving Britons have routed the French in every conflict from Agincourt to the present day.

IRELAND SAVES EUROPE

Today is a great day for freedom! Freedom loving people in Europe and around the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Irish people for voting "NO" on the Lisbon Treaty, which is effectively the constitution for a totalitarian superstate that unelected European elites seek to impose on that continent. It would have destroyed national sovereignty, made national parliaments irrelevant, and has even redrawn European maps with new regions and without national borders. It would accomplish, through bureaucratic fiat, what Napoleon and Hitler could not.


From The Telegraph
By James Kirkup, Tom Peterkin in Dublin and Bruno Waterfield in Brussels

Gordon Brown is under intense pressure to declare the Lisbon Treaty dead after Irish voters delivered an overwhelming vote against the European Union's drive toward greater integration.

In the only popular vote on the treaty to be held in the EU, 53.4 per cent of the Irish electorate rejected its terms – plunging the EU's plans to create a new European president and foreign minister into turmoil.

MPs and campaigners from across the political spectrum called on the Prime Minister to halt moves towards British ratification of the text in the wake of the vote, with David Cameron saying the treaty should now be "declared dead".

The agreement, which would sweep away dozens of national vetoes, must be ratified by all 27 European Union members before it can take force next year.

Opponents said the emphatic Irish result meant the project – described as an attempt to revive the defunct EU constitution – should be completely abandoned.

Mr Brown however, is preparing to defy British public opinion by pushing ahead with the treaty's ratification in parliament. Government legislation ratifying the text is due to get its third and final reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said: "It is right that we follow the view that each country must follow the ratification process to its conclusion. It is right that we continue with our own process."

Mr Cameron described the Government's plans as the "height of arrogance" and accused the Government of "flying in the face of public opinion."

He said that Mr Brown should go to the commons on Monday to explain what would happen now.

"If this is not dead, we must be able to have the referendum in this country so that we have the chance to pass judgment on this treaty and put the final nail in its coffin," he said.

Ministers privately concede that abandoning the ratification, Britain would seal the fate of the treaty.

Mr Brown is said to believe that doing so would reduce Britain's influence and split the EU, with countries like France and Germany press ahead with their own integration plans.

However, his determination to push ahead with the treaty puts him at odds with British voters, with opinion polls showing that most reject the document.

A Daily Telegraph campaign seeking a UK referendum on the text last year gathered well over 100,000 signatories.

William Hague, the Conservative shadow foreign secretary, insisted that the British parliamentary ratification process must be stopped immediately.

"The Irish people have spoken and they have made clear that they do not want a Treaty that takes so many powers from the countries of Europe and gives it to distant institutions in Brussels," he said.

"Despite all the threats that have been made they have had the courage to make their own decision. They deserve Europe's admiration and congratulations.

The call was echoed by Labour MPs. Frank Field, a leading Labour opponent of the treaty, said the British process should stop at once.

He said: "The result speaks volumes. The people in the one country given a chance to vote have clearly rejected the Treaty. The Government must now withdraw its Bill ratifying the Treaty which should now be dead'.

Ian Davidson, another Labour opponent of the document said: "It is enormously significant that the only people who have had the chance to vote on the treaty have rejected it by a substantial margin. Now is the time for a period of reflection."

However, European leaders were making plans to find a legal way around the Irish 'No' vote.

Nicholas Sarkozy, the French President, was working with EU leaders and diplomats to plan a special "legal arrangement" to bypass the referendum rejection.

In a joint statement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the French leader insisted the treaty was "necessary" for the EU and would go ahead.

Mr Sarkozy assumes the rotating presidency of the EU next month, and at a summit in Brussels next week he and Mr Brown will insist that the ratification process continues unchanged.

British sources said that the summit is likely to conclude that the Irish vote is a problem for the Irish government, not the rest of the EU.

"The Irish government will have to go away and think about how to proceed, but the rest of us will keep going," said a Foreign Office source.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, insisted that treaty would not be stopped.

"The treaty is alive," Mr Barroso said in Brussels. "The remaining ratifications should continue to take their course."

Every major political party in Ireland had backed a Yes vote, with opposition being led by Libertas, a small, privately-funded campaign group.

Declan Ganley, head of Libertas, said the vote should kill the Lisbon Treaty.

"The No result is the final answer on this particular Treaty That's democracy. That's how it works," he said.

Even the pro-European Liberal Democrats said the Irish result should halt Britain's move to approve the treaty.

Edward Davey, the party's foreign affairs spokesman said: "Once scrutiny of the treaty is completed in Westminster next week its ratification should be suspended."

Bill Cash, the veteran Tory eurosceptic, said: "Gordon Brown must now abandon the British moves to ratify the Treaty and renegotiate the treaties of the European Union. The Conservative party must seize the opportunity to decimate the government's European police and restore democracy to the UK."

Officials in London, Dublin and Brussels were at a loss to explain how Ireland's approval for the Lisbon Treaty can be secured following the result.

In 2001, the Irish rejected the EU's Nice Treaty, but were ultimately pressured into endorsing it in a second referendum after some sections of that text were re-written to address concerns about Ireland's military neutrality.

Privately, some diplomats fear that it will be impossible to address the Irish grievances against Lisbon, which are much wider than the objections raised to the Nice Treaty.

One senior British official said: "With the Nice vote, you could identify specific problems the Irish had with the text, answer them and then move on. But this is less focused, more a general rejection of the whole project, and accommodating it within the process could be very, very difficult."

Brian Cowan, the Irish Prime Minister, appeared to rule out a second Irish referendum to ratify the treaty, insisting that the issue of another vote "didn't arise".

He said: "The result does bring about considerable uncertainty and a difficult situation. There is no quick fix."

The EU Lisbon Treaty: Gordon Brown Surrenders Britain's Sovereignty

From The Heritage Foundation

by Nile Gardiner, Ph.D. and Sally McNamara

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's decision to reject a referendum on the new European Union Reform Treaty (Treaty of Lisbon) should be viewed as one of the biggest acts of political betrayal in modern British history. Despite a rebellion by 29 of its own backbenchers, the Labour-led government defeated a Conservative proposal to hold a popular vote on the Lisbon Treaty by 311 votes to 248 in the House of Commons on March 5. Brown's refusal to support a referendum represented a stunning reversal of the government's 2005 manifesto pledge to hold a plebiscite on the European Constitution.

The Commons vote flew in the face of fierce public opposition to the Lisbon Treaty and mounting calls for the British public to have its say. In a series of unofficial mini-referenda held across several marginal seats in early March, 89 percent of the more than 150,000 voters who took part voted against the treaty, with just 8 percent in favor.[1] These votes reflected consistently high levels of opposition to the treaty in virtually all major polls on the issue in the U.K. in the past few months.

Most British voters have already concluded that the Lisbon Treaty is almost identical to the old European Constitution, which was emphatically rejected by electorates in France and Holland in 2005. If ratified in all European capitals, the treaty will come into force in January 2009, and the implications for the future of Europe are immense. So far, only the Irish government has been brave enough to stand up to Brussels and insist on a popular vote by its citizens.

The new Treaty poses the biggest threat to national sovereignty in Europe since the Second World War, would threaten the future of the Anglo-American Special Relationship, and would significantly weaken the transatlantic alliance.

A Blueprint for a European Superstate

Like the rejected constitution, the new Reform Treaty is also a blueprint for a European superstate dreamt up by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. This time around, however, most of Europe doesn't get to vote, as democracy is too dangerous a concept for the architects of this grand vision of an EU superpower.

Originally envisioned as a single market within Europe, the EU (formerly European Economic Community) is morphing into a gigantic political entity with ambitions of becoming the world's first supranational superstate. Already, major strides have been made in the development of a unified European foreign and security policy as well as a supranational legal structure. With the introduction of the euro in 1999, the European single currency and European Central Bank became a reality.

Drafted in 2004, the European Constitution was a huge step forward in the evolution of what is commonly known as the "European Project," or the drive toward "ever closer union." With its 448 articles, the constitution was a vast vanity project, conceived in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, that dramatically crashed to Earth three years ago. Since then, European Union apparatchiks have worked feverishly to resurrect the constitution, coming up with a cosmetic makeover that would make a plastic surgeon proud.

The new treaty contains all the main elements of the constitution, repackaged in flowery language. According to the European Scrutiny Committee, a British parliamentary body, only two of the treaty's 440 provisions were not contained in the original constitution.[2]

The Reform Treaty paves the way for the creation of a European Union foreign minister (high representative) at the head of an EU foreign service (with its own diplomatic corps) as well as a long-term EU president; both positions are trappings of a fledgling superstate. As European Parliament member Daniel Hannan has pointed out, the treaty will further erode the legal sovereignty of European nation-states, entrenching a pan-European magistracy ("Eurojust"), a European Public Prosecutor, a federal EU police force ("Europol"), and an EU criminal code ("corpus juris").[3] In addition, countries such as Britain will sacrifice their veto right over EU decision-making in 40 policy areas.

A Democratic Deficit

Europe doesn't need a constitution. The European Union is not the United States of Europe. The EU is a grouping of 27 independent nation-states, each with its own culture, language, heritage, and national interests. The EU works best as a single economic market that facilitates the free movement of goods, services, and people. It is far less successful as a political entity that tries to force its member states to conform to an artificial common identity.

The European Constitution and its successor treaty are all about the centralization of political power in the hands of a gilded ruling elite in Brussels, not the protection of individual liberty. They are also based on the principle that sovereignty should be pooled by nation-states for the "greater good" of Europe, a concept that goes against the grain of modern history, as witnessed with the break-up of the old Soviet Empire.

The notion that the people of Europe should not have a vote on a treaty with huge implications for the future of the continent demonstrates the utter contempt that the Brussels bureaucracy has for the average man or woman on the street. There is no doubt that if the treaty were put to a popular vote, the electorates of several countries would reject it. The whole "European Project" is fundamentally undemocratic, unaccountable, and opaque. If subjected to referenda across the EU, it would almost certainly be consigned to the dustbin of history.

A Threat to the Special Relationship

For both sides of the Atlantic, the Lisbon Treaty is bad news. The treaty poses a massive threat to the future of the Anglo-American Special Relationship as well as the broader transatlantic alliance. It will further entrench Europe's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), both major threats to the future of NATO, and will seriously impair the ability of America's allies in Europe to stand alongside the United States where and when they choose to do so.

An America without Britain alongside it would be far more isolated and friendless and significantly less able to project power on the world stage. For Washington, there is no real alternative to the Special Relationship. Its collapse would be damaging to America's standing as a global power and would significantly weaken her leadership of the war against Islamist terrorism.

A Future British Government Must Hold a Referendum

The next British government, which must be elected by 2010 at the latest, should listen to the growing calls of the British people for a vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The public should have the final say on an agreement that will dramatically undermine the U.K.'s ability to shape her own destiny. If, as is highly likely, the public rejects the treaty, Britain should withdraw from its provisions and seek a broader renegotiation of its relationship with the European Union.

The next Prime Minister, if Brown is replaced, should heed the words of Lady Thatcher, who wrote in her seminal book Statecraft: "That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era."[4] The Iron Lady's instincts are right: Common sense must prevail, and the British people should have the freedom to reject an Orwellian vision of Europe's future in favor of the principles of sovereignty and freedom.

Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., is the Director of, and Sally McNamara is Senior Policy Analyst in European Affairs in, the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. Erica Munkwitz assisted with research for this paper.

---

[1]Toby Helm, "Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for EU Referendum," The Daily Telegraph, March 3, 2008, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/02/neu102.xml.

[2]"Q&A: EU Treaty," The Daily Telegraph, October 14, 2007, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/14/nbrown214.xml.

[3]Daniel Hannan, MEP, "Those Euro-Myths Exploded," The Daily Telegraph, October 19, 2007, at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/danielhannan/october/euromythsexploded.htm.

[4]Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 410.

WHAT POLITICAL ORATORY SHOULD BE!

It was, they kept telling us, "the President's last State of the Union Address," and as it droned on your scribe kept thinking "thanks be to God." How will the President ever carry on a conversation after he leaves office without millions and billions to promise in every sentence, for every cause, foreign and domestic?

In case you've forgotten, here's what a skilled orator (and a real conservative) sounds like. This is William Hague, the former Conservative Party Leader debating the Lisbon Treaty in Parliament last Monday. The Spectator has called it "the speech of 2008."

KRAKOW ARCHDIOCESE PRESSES CRITIQUE OF EU FAILURE TO ACKNOWLEDGE GOD

Wawel Hill with Royal Castle and Cathedral, Krakow, Poland

Krakow, Dec. 26, 2007 (CWNews.com) - A statement chiding the European Union for failing to acknowledge God will be read in all the parishes of the Krakow, Poland, archdiocese this coming Sunday, the Dziennik newspaper reports.

Father Jan Maciej Dyduch, the rector of Poland’s Pontifical Theological Academy, is the author of the statement, which expresses "regret that the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty does not contain an invocation of God."

"It is as if Europe-- represented by an influential group of politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists-- fears Jesus and His Gospel," the criticism continues. The Church statement concludes that "Europe risks becoming a spiritual desert.”

The drive to include an explicit mention of God, and of the Christian foundation of European culture, was one of the last major public campaigns undertaken by the late Pope John Paul II (bio - news)-- who was Archbishop of Krakow from 1964 until he was elected Pontiff in 1978.