When NO dosen't mean NO

The trouble with allowing people to vote is they are sometimes prone to vote the wrong way. Usually people fail to see past tribal loyalty and vote unthinkingly for whatever their Party tells them to. Of course on the EU this means that being Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat is irrelevant, all three parties vote the same way, 100% pro-EU. However, sometimes even party loyalty can't make people vote for something they know is wrong! The Labour Party famously lost the argument on elected regional Assemblies when 80% of one of their few remaining blindly loyal areas, the North East, voted NO. This was despite a last minute campaign that abandoned the previous None-Party approach and claimed a NO Vote was a Tory Vote.

The obvious feelings of a majority of the British people, decidedly Euro Sceptic, is the main reason why successive UK Governments have refused point blank to allow the British people a referendum on EU Membership. This Labour Government even weaseling out on is promise of a vote on the EU Constitution, now repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. Of course Ireland, the only country where a vote has been allowed, voted NO, which was obviously the wrong answer as far as the EU Project was concerned.

Have the Brussels Bureaucrats accepted this vote? Of Course they haven't! When the Dutch and French voted NO to the Constitution the Brussels Commissioners made some superficial wording changes, mainly crossing out Constitution and inserting "Lisbon Treaty" and re-submitted the document. It's no longer a Constitution was the claim and so allowed Britain to weasel out of their promise on a referendum and allowed the French and Dutch government to ratify it through parliament without all that bother of asking the people what they thought.

The Irish problem however is a little more complex so officials in Brussels have decided the Irish Republic will be told to hold a second referendum on the Lisbon/EU constitutional Treaty. An internal EU briefing paper entitled “The Solution to the Irish Problem” says the Dublin government will give in to demands for a second vote to overturn the previous rejection of the treaty before an EU summit in October.

The briefing suggests that the second referendum would be held in the autumn of next year, leading to the final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2010. An influential group of French officials has written the document inserting guarantees on abortion, taxes, the country’s neutrality and the maintenance of the Irish Commissioner in Brussels. However, the president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, wants the Irish to vote again, and give the "right" answer, before next year’s European elections. He fears the poll will become a referendum on a treaty many people in Europe do not like.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage MEP has said that is precisely how our party sees the 2009 Euro-vote, it will be the referendum that the British people were promised but were never given.