"Our Government keeps saying that this treaty is not the same as the old constitution, despite the mockery of almost everyone who has read it. But in one way it is different: it’s even less readable. And that, as senior politicians in Germany and Belgium and Italy have explained, is deliberate. This is an utterly cynical exercise, and our own politicians are cheapened by it.

What’s in the treaty? Britain will lose around 50 vetoes in areas including health, energy and laws for the self-employed. Our power to form blocking coalitions with other nations will also be considerably diminished, because the thresholds will be changed. So proposals that we have been successfully blocking – one of my favourites is making the police give every suspect a piece of A4, listing their EU rights – will almost certainly become law. That’s before you get to any “red lines”.



From a wider European point of view, the democratic gap between every nation and its citizens will grow again. Nation states will lose control of policing and justice matters. It used to be thought that the ability to define what was a crime and what was not, to police that crime and to determine the appropriate sentence for it, were matters for sovereign states alone. When the European Community was set up, justice and home affairs were kept strictly separate, as was foreign policy. This treaty waves those principles aside."