Under the Radar

The EU superstate demonstrates its attitudes to the peasants it wishes to rule over.

I am clutching in my hot, trembling hands the most extraordinary document I have come across in eight years of Euro-politics. It is a letter from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to her fellow EU heads of government. In it, she proposes a scheme to bring back the European Constitution under a new name - or, as she artlessly puts it, "to use different terminology without changing the legal substance".

That would be the Constitution rejected by voters the last time they tried to implement it.

These changes mainly involve dropping paragraphs that the voters don't like, and which are in any case unnecessary because they restate what is in existing treaties. Thus, Mrs Merkel suggests excising the reference to the primacy of EU law. Since this concept has been part of EU jurisprudence since 1964, she reasons, there is no point in rubbing people's noses in the fact by spelling it out.

Similarly, she has a clever wheeze to "replace the full text of the Charter of Fundamental Rights with a short cross-reference having the same legal value". And so on.

And the worst of it is that they're trying to sneak these changes through this time without any kind of referendum on the matter. The political elite didn't get their way last time so they obviously now consider that they can get the same result without having to run it past the people who vote first. I don't know what's worse- that our elected officials care more for the EU than their own country or that the vast majority of British voters most likely won't be appalled to the core by this.