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European Affairs

I have the gravest doubts as to whether the Liberal party has any clear idea about where it is going with any policy, but an important point about the in or out question is being overlooked: that the proposed treaty is in fact a merger, through binding mandate, of all the treaties on the European Community and the European Union. It is also substantially equivalent to the original constitutional treaty, and that combination means that any referendum on a yes or no question would effectively come down to asking whether or not the British people wanted all those treaties. That is as close as I can get to asking whether we should be in or out, and I believe that some people may be underestimating the extent to which any referendum on the reform treaty would turn out to be one on all the treaties, as a whole.