THE BIG EU CON

RMTnews :: august/september 2007 :: www.rmt.org.uk 14 R MT’s annual general meeting recently reiterated the union’s opposition to the privateer’s charter known as the EU Constitution. Since then a new version has been produced and the government claims it is different enough not to warrant the referendum it promised two years ago. However, only 10 out of 250 proposals in the new treaty are different from the proposals in the original EU Constitution. In other words, 96 per cent of the text is the same. Almost all EU leaders have also stressed that the “new” treaty is the same as the old EU one. SAME TREATY While Britain’s Europe Minister Jim Murphy claims that “the reform treaty will differ fundamentally from the Constitutional Treaty in its substance”. German Chancellor Angela Merkel says “the substance of the Constitution is preserved. That is a fact”. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero admits “we have not let a single substantial point of the Constitutional treaty go”. While European Communications Commissioner Margot Wallstrom admits: “it’s essentially the same proposal as the old Constitution”. Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos says “The wrapping has been changed, but not the content” and "legal primacy has been saved with a declaration". Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato admits that EU leaders had “decided that the document should be unreadable”, explaining that this would allow Gordon Brown to present the text to Parliament and say “look, you see, it's absolutely unreadable, it's the typical Brussels treaty, nothing new, no need for a referendum”. The other ploy the government is using is to claim that the new “treaty” contains a gaggle of opt-outs and other “safeguards”. However, most of these were in the original version of the Constitution - on which the government promised a referendum. These “safeguards” are designed to distract from the really big change proposed by the Constitution, which is giving the EU’s own European Court of Justice full jurisdiction over justice, policing and other areas of law. This Constitution is designed to give the EU the constitutional form of a state, owing obedience to its laws and loyalty to its authority. It would transfer more powers to the EU and establish law-making powers over 50 new areas of policy. In other words, an unelected and irremovable oligarchy would make binding laws for over 500 million people without a mandate to do so. POWER TO PRIVATISE Part Three of the Constitution will be transposed into the new treaty intact and without debate. However, this gives the EU a permanent neoliberal orientation and gives Brussels the power to privatise services, the more reason for the No votes in both France and the Netherlands. As Dutch left MEP Erik Meijer wrote: "The constitution protects freedom for enterprises and 'free, unrestricted competition”. What this means in neoliberal Europe has become ever more clear in recent years. Basic services in public transport, post, energy and telecommunications are seen as profitable assets to be sold off to the private sector. The Lisbon Summit in 2000 began encouraging the selling of such services to major corporations. Through compulsory tendering it has also become necessary for the remaining public services to compete with others. This means that sooner or later they will disappear, because they are small, caring, and attached to a particular region, and deliberately not equipped to operate in competition with others. As a result, the GMB union recently come out in favour of a referendum, while the T&G section of UNITE and UNISON are among the unions which also oppose the treaty. AN EU ‘GOVERNMENT’ Labour MP Gisela Stuart has warned that the new treaty would incorporate the European Council into the EU structures for the first time, forcing EU leaders to "promote its values, advance its objectives, serve its interests” rather than those of member states. The European Council was originally set up in 1974 as an informal forum for heads of EU member states to meet. She argues, “It used to be that leaders met in order to co- ordinate the interest of the nation states. Under this new structure, that body where heads of state meet will become subordinate to the union's interests. “They will now have a duty to represent the interests of the union, not the interests of the member state. It's a consolidation of the way the union works into a structure which is much more like a government," she says. Stuart was a member of the convention which drew up the original Constitution and she also says that the new treaty is the same. "The main constitutional arrangements, such as giving the union a single legal personality so that it can enter into treaties itself - that's all still there," she says. For more information go to www.tuaeuc.org THE BIG EU CON RMT calls for a referendum on the EU Constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005 A new pamphlet on the ‘new’ EU Constitution is available free from info@tuaeuc.org