Irish vote yes to Lisbon treaty

The Irish on the second time of asking have just voted yes for the Lisbon treaty. The powers that be could not accept a no vote the first time and so decided to wait a while and then ask again. What happened to change the Irish people’s minds and make them vote yes? Nothing I can see apart from ensuring that each member state has a commissioner. Apart from that nothing has changed that made the majority of people vote no last time. This is not democracy.

The Irish people have been bullied and cajoled into voting yes with threats that their already poor economy will not recover. The Irish economy has been in free-fall and the majority of people may want some help from the EU and to turn against them now may have prevented this. They have voted because they were scared things might get worse and the powers that be have played on those fears.

The referendum campaign has certainly been biased heavily in favour of a yes vote. The Irish broadcasting commission changed its own rules on fair balance during political reporting so that 70% of coverage went to the yes vote against the no vote. Also the money spent on convincing the Irish to vote yes was immense. The amount spent on the yes campaign outspent the no campaign 10 to 1 and the Irish newspapers have been full of EU sponsored adverts trying to convince the people to vote yes.

Big business went into overdrive spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of their own money on campaigns to persuade the Irish to vote the “right way”. Ryan Air, Ireland’s favourite low budget airline delivered their own campaign for a yes vote spending €500,000 of their own money on the campaign and there have been claims that the EU broke its own rules of neutrality by its stunt of flying on Ryan air with the airlines boss promising thousands of free airline tickets to the Irish public if they voted yes.

We should always be wary of wanting anything that big business does. If big business says its good for us then we should automatically investigate the opposite. Large companies transcend national boundaries and love the EU because it means they have fewer currencies to deal with, standardised working practises, common laws and most of all it’s easy for them to take workers used to a low wage from one part of the EU and use them in countries used to higher wages. They care little about democracy and the rights of man but more about low tax rates and high profits. However even with all the big power players in the business world cajooling the public to vote for the Lisbon treaty it seems that by voting yes the Irish may have been shooting themselves in the foot.

Before the recent economic decline they were considered one of the success stories of Europe, a tiger economy due to their low corporation taxes which have helped attract major companies to the emerald isle to do business. However secret memos released over the last weeks suggest that plans for corporation tax to be harmonised across the EU are in the pipeline and this would be sure to hurt Ireland’s economy especially as it tries to come out its deep and painful recession. These plans were to be kept quiet during the referendum so as not to hurt the yes campaign and scare off voters.

However it was very obvious that the powers that be wanted the Irish to vote yes. I wonder if the vote had gone the other way how long would we have had to wait before the Irish were given a third opportunity to vote the correct way.

At least the Irish have had two chances to voice their opinion on the EU experiment. Those of us who live in the UK have had no such opportunity. We were promised a referendum and then had that tantalizing chance of telling those in power just really what we thought about the EU taken away from us when the EU constitution changed its name to the Lisbon treaty.

This slight of hand by the EU meant that the British prime minister Gordon Brown could claim that  there was no longer any need for a referendum as we were no longer voting for a constitution which would have replaced all previous treaties but rather just an amending treaty to go along with all the other treaties we have never voted on such as Maastricht and Amsterdam.

Forget the fact that most EU politicians and leaders claim that nothing changed between this renaming of the constitution. Such as former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who said

“The Treaty of Lisbon is the same as the rejected constitution. Only the format has been changed to avoid referendums.”

Therefore the people in the UK have been royally screwed by those in power yet again who only see their own interests rather than the people they are supposed to serve. We have our next leader in waiting David Cameron trying the same trick at the moment of claiming to offer the people choice to vote on the treaty if he gets into office to gather up Euro sceptic voters surely knowing that by the time he gets elected there will be little he can do if all the countries in the EU have already ratified their treaties.

He is holding out on a very slim chance that there will still be one country left in the EU zone that hasn’t ratified the treaty yet maybe the Czech republic. However I can see him doing the usual politician trick of changing his mind as soon as he gets into power. Look out for an invitation to next years Bilderberg meeting for Mr Cameron where those who pull the stings can “persuade” him that its in his best interest to drop this offer for a public vote.

This behaviour of the EU not being willing to accept a member states decision by referendum when it goes against the “plan” is just very indicative of how this “super state” runs business and should be a very major warning to anyone who thinks the EU offers hope for a better Europe for the common man. Yes the EU is good for businesses and has given us some good things such as the human rights act and easier travel across borders. However it is a very undemocratic organisation and until some major root and branch reform is carried out will continues to be so.

The EU parliament which is the only opportunity the people of the EU have a chance to elect members to is little more than a talking shop that has no real power over the decisions the EU makes. These big decisions are taken by the Council of Ministers and EU commission. The commissioners are selected usually from failed national politicians such as Neil Kinnock and Peter Mandelson after he was kicked out the UK cabinet for the 2nd time.

The primary reason for the EU’s creation was to prevent another major war from occurring which our continent has suffered more than most. Putting Germany and France in a political partnership would ensure that these two countries would stop invading each other and dragging the rest of the continent in behind them. The problem is that a lot of the politicians from these two countries in particular wanted the EC (as it was known back then) to evolve pretty quickly from a free trade area into a political entity. This is still the case and if you actually listen to the major players from Europe speak they are not shy of talking about their wish for the EU to become a major political power on par with the USA and in fact a lot of the French actually cherish the chance for the EU to become a “super power” with its own president, army, national anthem and all the other signs of state which are all anathema to the British.

However its precisely because our leaders know the true design of the EU and the plans for its progress to become more than just a common trading zone with some shared laws that they don’t want to give us the opportunity to have our say. Europe is a very large area and contains large groups of people with opposing views that range from far right nationalism to far left communist parties. There are countries with economies based round a free market and then there are those that are more state managed. Tax bands range from progressive to very high in the more socialist Scandinavian countries to flat taxes in the ex soviet states such as Estonia.

Therefore trying to push such a large group of people with such wide and differing social, cultural, economic and religious views into one homogeneous group seems like something only those people who have too much money and see the human population as their own personal plaything would attempt to do. However such an attempt to create a European super-state is being implemented whether the politicians in Britain want to admit it to the people or not. The world is being split up into multi-national regional blocks and the EU seems to be the template that others will follow. It looks like the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) will probably turn into an American version within 10 or 20 years and there has just recently been talk of creating a South East Asian free trade zone by 2015.

Therefore the world is becoming less based on national lines and more on regional blocks of countries. Is it not a logical inference to say that the conclusion of this trend would be a one world government?

If so what does this mean for the common man and woman’s chance to influence decision making in their new super government. We already have enough trouble getting our voices heard in national democracies due to the power of lobbyists, big business and powerful people with money and influence. These are the people who actually make the important decisions and foster policies in their own interest that are then turned into laws which are forced on us.

This lack of a voice is even more watered down when it moves from our national government up to the European parliament and it would be even more insignificant when a world government is created down the line. When the power to make certain laws is removed from national level and taken away to super-national level then what hope has the common man got of being able to change anything? We only need to look at the UN and how ineffective it is now for a glimpse of how a future super-national government would look like.

The big powers such as the USA and China or smaller countries with powerful friends such as Israel continue to ignore any resolutions that go against with impunity whereas smaller countries who have angered the bigger ones feel the full force of any action that those who dish out hypocritical punishment decide to deliver. All the while big business who trancend national boundaries continue to make money by dubious means and buy off any punishment that is threatened but never handed out through bribes, campaign contributions or promises of cushy jobs on retirement.

Therefore the way I see it progressing from national governance to super-national will just be business as usual but on a grander scale. Nothing will actually change for the little people only the greed, fraud, lies and decisions that are good for business but bad for everyone else will be magnified a thousand times. Therefore its a shame Ireland has chosen to vote yes to further integration into an already corrupt institution and our only hope of stopping this juggernaut is by reforming it from within.

View this article of mine about how technology could be used to make a more democratic government possible.

http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2009/08/we-need-a-new-form-of-government/