Jon Bright (London, OK): The EU treaty, on which debate in parliament starts next Monday, is going to be the very epitome of a political football, and Fraser Nelson has a superb match preview in the Spectator. All three teams parties will be trying to score some political points whilst keeping their back line intact: Brown will be hoping to prevent backbenchers in marginal seats defecting to protect their own slender margins, Cameron will have to decide what he would do if the treaty is ratified (2010 will be far too late for a referendum) - and make enough concessions to the Eurosceptics in the party to keep them in line, and Clegg will have to justify Menzies Campbell's original decision not to support a referendum on the treaty (which was promised in the last Lib Dem manifesto), whilst instead pushing for a more fundamental referendum on whether Britain wants to be in or out of the EU.
All of this will be set against a background of low-grade public hostility towards the EU - not of the type that will get people out on the streets, but certainly of the type that would make them vote 'no' if asked any question with the word EU in it. It seems quite likely, with every party standing to lose, that all of them would rather not have the debate at all. Brown's tactics may be the trickiest to get right - the Eurosceptic who signed the treaty - and Nelson raises this possibility:
There is another option allowing the Prime Minister to dust down his Eurosceptic credentials, which I understand he is seriously considering. He is planning a raft of constitutional reform this year — and may include in this an order for English courts to regard English common law as paramount, and superior to Strasbourg law. It could be, to adapt one of his recent phrases, English laws for English judges. Ideally, this jurisprudential missile would be best launched six months before an election — long enough for him to take credit, but not long enough to be tested in the courts.
By the time all the positioning is through, the real debate - is this a 'good' or 'bad' thing - will be nothing more than a distant memory. Europhiles will not find many politicians voting for the treaty who are willing to outline its merits (indeed, it will be presented as inconsequential and full of red lines). Europhobes will find their numerical superiority once again abused for the purposes of political positioning by parties who have no intention of taking Britain out of Europe. Constitutional law, with genuine impacts on people's lives, will be developed on the fly for the purposes of short term electoral gain. And the majority, feeling strongly neither one way nor the other, will probably turn over to watch an actual football match, where the goalposts don't move and it's clear what side people are on. Who could blame them?
