Lest we forget: in the midst of today’s Budget-mania, pause and consider that the Lisbon Treaty, a sweeping package of reforms to our relationship with the EU, cleared the Commons without a hitch last night. So much for Tony Blair’s promise in April 2004 to mount a definitive national debate on the original EU Constitutional Treaty (of which the present Treaty is a shame-faced near-replica). “Let the issue be put and let the battle be joined!” declared Blair in the Commons. Well, that pledge of a referendum was dumped on the spurious grounds that the new text is not “constitutional” – and so there will be no battle to join. This is how the argument ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.
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