Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit):The Irish "no" vote has not only exposed the degree to which the leaders of the European Union are prepared to consider going ahead with the Lisbon Treaty in defiance of their own rules and, let it be said, most likely popular opinion across the 27 member states. It has also revealed the hypocrisies of the non-debate in this country.
On the one hand, we have the opponents of European integration who continuously beat the drum about the "faceless bureaucrats" in Brussels who rule our lives, who are stealing our national identity, who . . . - well, you can fill this space with any complaints you like from immigration to high fuel prices to nasty smells creeping across the Channel. The fact is that it is the governments and political class in each of the states who rule the Union, and its democratic de-legitimatisation is their failure.
On the other hand, there is the spectacle of David Miliband and Denis MacShane explaining as if to a fifth-form citizenship class that we live in a parliamentary democracy. Parliament is best placed to subject the Treaty to scrutiny and is doing just that over months of meticulous debate. The trouble is that this argument has long ago been rumbled. It is not just switched on political scientists who know very well that Parliament is the creature of the executive, everyone knows it. Everyone knows also that governments from Ted Heath onwards have deliberately evaded any debate on joining or remaining in Europe for fear of the electorate saying no, the one exception being the referendum that Tony Benn and the Labour party forced on Harold Wilson in the 1970s. MacShane even trashed people who had the temerity to disagree with the elite consensus.
All this means that David Cameron is able effortlessly to ride popular disaffection to score against the government. He may well be riding a tiger that will turn on him and us all. But surely it is not too much to ask that the pro-European governments and politicians should get out and meet their peoples at last, should produce a treaty that most of could understand, should transform the Union into a social entity, should bloody well humble themselves. But it is not just the politicians. When I joined the group demanding a referendum here on the European Constitution, earning and well-meaning pro-Europeans exhorted me to think again - the issues were too complicated to be understood by ordinary people.
