Tony Blair the Gambler
Gordon. Put the whole lot on 36 red!
What has he got to lose? He has had two terms in power and things are getting sticky. In cricket you usually go for sixes in that situation.
Steven Den Beste has an interesting comparison on the proposed EU constitution and the US constitution. Warning: If you click on">http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/01/Europeandisunity.shtml">on the link, you'll have to scroll quite a way down. The bulk of his post discusses why Europe is becoming less relevant to the world as a whole. However, he makes some interesting comments on the EU proposal.
It's been very interesting to compare and contrast the American constitutional process and the European one. The American proposal fit on four pieces of paper; the European one runs to hundreds of pages. The American proposal concentrated almost exclusively on the structure and powers of the proposed government, but the EU constitution is much different.
In my opinion, the single deepest flaw in the proposed EU constitution is that it attempts to prescribe not just the structure of the resulting government, but also what its policies must be on a wide variety of subjects. Many questions which the Americans assumed would be dealt with by the Legislative and Executive branches of the United States are hard-wired in the now-failed EU constitution, and thus placed beyond the reach of Europe's citizens or their elected representatives.
He then gives specific examples from the proposed EU constitution.
"the proposed EU constitution is that it attempts to prescribe not just the structure of the resulting government, but also what its policies must be on a wide variety of subjects"
Now why are they doing that? Is it because the framers of the EU constitution basically don't trust the EU Parlement, and are planning to run the EU not by having the parlement vote on laws regarding this and that but by lots more direct referenda? (I think 'referendum' is IVth declension, regular, but I won't look it up so Cassy and Khobrah will have something to do with their day) See my coming post "California Government" in this thread.
Or is it just an example of Bureaucracy run amok? Give a bunch of Enarques a piece of paper and they produce 8,000 pages of dense prose?
Terrible idea but now politically necessary.
I think that Blair should be brave and run the Euro Referendum simulataneously. This would stop the media turning the Constitutional Referendum into a "get out of Europe" poll!