Imagine that, leaving the pub on Saturday night, you find a fight outside. The Gardai turn up, grab a load of people, including you, and drag you off to the station, and throw in a beating in the back of the van. Next morning you are taken to an interview room and an old garda gives you a cup of tea, apologises for the “mix-up” earlier and says you can go as soon as you’ve signed a 6 page statement he’s prepared for you.Only trouble is, he can’t let you read what the statement says before you sign. He assures you it’s fine, the statement is in your best interests, you just need to trust him and sign and this will all be over. Would you sign?

If you would, then vote yes for the Lisbon treaty. This is how the Lisbon treaty is being put to us. They’ve deliberately made it impossible to read, but they assure us that it’s for our own good.

If you trust our bosses and politicians to have made an agreement that is in the best interests of ordinary European workers, even if they won’t let us read it, then say yes to Lisbon. If, like us, you know our bosses and politicians too well to buy that, then say no.

The Lisbon treaty does have one good side. It makes it clear as day that, at the level of the political elites and capitalist class, European unification has already happened. The fact that every mainstream political party in every EU country has agreed to back this treaty is proof positive of this.

The constitutional anoraks bore us with the trivial details of this recycled EU Constitution, as if the disempowerment of working people was due to some legal trickery. As long as the law of property defends the monopolisation of land, the means of producing social wealth are in the hands of a tiny few and the vast majority of us are forced to sell our labour to them, then no constitution, whether Irish or European, will deliver the promise of democracy - to give power to the people.
The only way to work for this is by rising to the challenge of countering the European unity of our exploiters, by linking together our struggles of resistance to them. We can begin by refusing to sign this blank cheque for the bosses.

Vote NO to Lisbon on June 12th.

This article is from Workers Solidarity 103, May - June 2008

PDF of the Southern edition of WS103
PDF of northern edition of WS103