European Union (Amendment) Bill

I thought that the proposed constitutional treaty was legally unprecedented. It would have legally abolished the European Union and refounded it under a single constitutional order. That is a very important point which has not been touched upon as yet. The IGC mandate made that very clear and records that all 27 heads of government agreed that: "““The constitutional concept—which consisted in repealing all existing treaties and replacing them with a single text called a constitution is abandoned””." The constitutional treaty would have done something which was legally unprecedented across Europe and here: it would have abolished all the previous treaties we have debated and introduced a single written constitution for Europe. That would have been quite novel for the UK where we have no written constitution. This treaty is constitutionally different from the constitutional treaty because it amends existing treaties. In effect, it does constitutionally what the Single European Act, Maastricht, Nice and Amsterdam did—it makes amendments to its predecessors. Those previous treaties neither replaced nor repealed their predecessors—and that is the fundamental difference between the Lisbon treaty and the rejected constitutional treaty. That is what makes the difference and that is why going back to a promise made in regard to a constitutional treaty does not wash when we are now debating the rightness or wrongness of a referendum. The constitutional treaty would have done something quite different to what this treaty does in constitutional terms for all of us.