Gordon Brown-Trousers and the Treaty of Doom

It looks like the game's up for Gordon Brown-Trousers, as far as the hated EU Reform Treaty goes.

In the run up to the last election, the Labour party promised to hold a referendum, giving the British people their chance to agree with, or oppose, the proposed European Constitution.

Before that could come to pass, "no" votes in similar referenda held in France and the Netherlands effectively killed off the Constitution, much to the relief of the British government. In place of the defunct Constitution, member states began beavering away on something to replace it.

The result was the deeply disturbing EU Reform Treaty, signed by Gordon Brown-Trousers in Lisbon just a few weeks ago. Despite extensive criticism, including a finding from MPs in the European scrutiny committee that the Treaty is "substantially equivalent" to the discredited Constitution, the Prime Minister has insisted that the two are not the same.

He has clung to the largely fictional differences between these documents, using them as an excuse to avoid honoring his party's promise to hold a referendum. After all, his thinking appears to go, if the Treaty isn't the same as the Constitution, we're not actually breaking any promises, are we? Sure, a lot of people, including other European leaders, many members of the British Parliament and most of the British population think they're the same, but so what? We promised a referendum on the Constitution and this is a Treaty. Not the same at all. Nope, not at all.

This kind of childish deception pervades Gordon Brown-Trousers' government to an even greater degree than it did Tony Blair's before him, and it just won't wash. The British people may be laid back to the point of impending horizontality, but they know perfectly well that if something looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, there's a very good chance that it's a duck, no matter what you call it.

Until today, Gordon Brown-Trousers was looking foolish and cowardly; we all know that he daren't hold a referendum because he is bound to lose, and, as was shown by his recent humiliating election climb-down, the prospect of losing is something that terrifies him more than anything else.

But, today, his situation has changed for the much, much worse. In a story that I first discovered in the Sun, and that has since been covered by pretty much all of the media, the extent to which Gordon Brown-Trousers has deliberately misled the country and, apparently, Parliament, is finally revealed.

According to the Sun, Frenchman Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who masterminded the original Constitution, said it had simply been recast to avoid a referendum in the UK. He admitted that all the Constitution's key elements remained in the Treaty, and that the format had been altered because a referendum in Britain would “obviously lead to a no vote”. He said: “In the Treaty of Lisbon the tools are largely the same. Only the order in which they are arranged in the tool-box has been changed."

So there we have it, straight from the horse's mouth. A few weeks ago, journalists at a press conference openly accused the Prime Minister of lying about his reasons for not calling a general election. Everyone thought he was telling porkies, but there was no proof, no smoking gun, nothing to show beyond any possible doubt that he had lied.

And so, instead of doing the decent thing, Gordon Brown-Trousers decided to tough it out, to insist on his version of events and stick to it no matter how pathetically, childishly dishonest it made him look. That approach is not going to help him this time.

The British Prime Minister has not been honest with his people on a matter of far greater importance than the usual political double-talk that we have come to expect from all politicians in recent years. The Treaty that he refuses to allow us to vote on introduces sweeping changes to the way in which we are governed, and even on such a fundamental point, he cannot, or will not, tell the truth.

There cannot, now, be any doubt that the Treaty and Constitution are substantially the same in all but name - the guy behind the Constitution has said so. Nor can we realistically be expected to believe that Gordon Brown-Trousers doesn't know they're the same - and if, by any remote chance, he doesn't know, then he's plainly too stupid to be in charge.

The implications are unavoidable; the Prime Minister has set about avoiding his party's promise to hold a referendum, despite an overwhelming majority of the population demanding just such a vote. In doing so, he and his ministers have asserted time and again that the Treaty is not the same as the Constitution. That assertion has now, once and for all, been shown to be untrue.

If they are prepared to lie - for that is what it amounts to - about so important an issue, how can we ever trust anything that Gordon Brown-Trousers says? In short, we can't. Even if he were prepared to make another humiliating U-turn and accede to demands for a referendum, how could trust what he said in his inevitable campaign for a "yes" vote?

Nothing this devious, power-mad Prime Minister has to say can be taken at face value in light of Valery Giscard d’Estaing's revelations, and that is simply not a tenable position for any Prime Minister to be in.

It is time for Gordon Brown-Trousers to go. Now.

Billy Seggars.