EU LEADERS TO BLAME FOR CONSTITUTION FAILURE - Euro MP

10.48.30am BST (GMT +0100) Tue 21st Jun 2005

As Tony Blair heads for Brussels this week to address MEPs on his plans for the UK presidency of the EU, A West Midlands Euro-MP has hit out at EU leaders for failing to lead on the Constitution.

Liz Lynne MEP accused EU heads of government of spending more time debating the failure to win support for the constitutional treaty than they did in trying to explain it in the first place.

But Liz says that rows over budgets and the suspension of the constitutional treaty do not herald the break up of the European Union.

"The common interests of EU governments in promoting trade, fighting environmental threats, and responding to world crises, remain vastly stronger than their differences," she commented.

"The events in Brussels last weekend demonstrated that the EU is not a superstate but a partnership of independent nations with views that sometimes differ."

Liz Lynne also claims that few voters in the French and Dutch referendums will have realised that by rejecting the constitutional treaty they were choosing to keep all the existing treaties.

She said: "EU governments never explained to people that it was not a choice between 'yes' and 'no' but between 'either' and 'or'.

"The constitutional treaty included little that was new but at least it was reasonably short. Now the enormous volumes of legal text, all of it approved by national parliaments, will remain in force as the EU rulebooks."

The constitutional treaty was 65,000 words long, with an additional 64,000 words in the annexes attached to it. However, the score of existing treaties and protocols have a combined length that runs into several million words.