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The speakers were Chris
Davies MEP and Gerald Kelly a member of UKIP. The Chairman was
Marie Birkenhead.
 
Chris Davies MEP
Gerald Kelly
The
Chairman opened the seminar by commenting
that the adoption of the European Constitution by the UK was
a significant issue for the country and for individuals,
their children and their grandchildren, and said that the two
speakers would present information to members about the
Constitution that would help them decide how to vote wisely
in the forthcoming referendum.
Gerald
Kelly spoke first, against ratifying the Constitution.
It appeared to him to be a set of rules for a club that
people would not
wish to belong to.
It would not be possible for him to discuss all the
detail of the 300- page Constitution document and he
commented that the ‘devil was in the detail’.
The document is effectively a Constitutional treaty
between governments. He considered that it was wrong to say that the new
Constitution was simply a ‘tidying up exercise’ of the
existing legislation, and that it was serious that it did not
provide for the devolution of powers to member states.
He was critical of the provision in the Constitution
for ‘competencies to have powers over the laws of member
states’. A
new feature would be that the European Union would have a
legal personality that would enable it to act as a single
state in international law.
The adoption of the euro was another important issue
because the Constitution stated clearly that ‘the currency
of the Union would be the euro’.
However, Gerald Kelly conceded that provision was
made for the Commission to give individual member states
permission to opt out of the euro. The
new Constitution would introduce qualified majority voting:
which would result in the veto being lost in
forty-three areas.
Mr Kelly concluded by saying that, although an exit
clause was included for states that signed up now to the new
Constitution, the terms for opting out later were very
severe.
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Chris Davies, now in his second term of office as an MEP, spoke in favour of
the Constitution. He opened by saying he would consider two questions that can
be asked about the new Constitution:
is the new Constitution an improvement on the
existing treaty and should Britain be in the EU?
Mr Davies maintained
that most British politicians believed that Britain should
be in the EU. His
own particular stance was that he wanted the EU to be an
efficient legislative body that was able to deal with
important issues, such as climate change, waste management
and trade; also
that there should be collective democratic control so that,
for example, the killing of innocent people is prevented. He
believed that the time-consuming negotiations prior to the
Treaty of Nice demonstrated the need for a new Constitution.
In particular, the question of voting rights of
member states needed to be settled.
He, like the UKIP speaker, considered the new
Constitution to be more than a tidying up exercise, but
maintained that smaller changes were envisaged than had
occurred in a 1980 revision:
none of the new changes would be very wide-sweeping.
National parliaments would continue to have to accept
subsidiarity. However, qualified majority voting would allow changes
to, for example, the Common Agricultural Policy, by removing
France’s ability to use the veto.
He concluded by saying that he wanted the EU to work
effectively in certain areas, leaving issues such as the
levels of taxation and social benefits to be decided by
individual member states.
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