{"id":436,"date":"2005-04-18T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-18T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2005\/04\/18\/non-story-of-the-day-or-is-it\/"},"modified":"2005-04-18T13:45:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-18T13:45:00","slug":"non-story-of-the-day-or-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2005\/04\/non-story-of-the-day-or-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Non-story of the day &#8211; or is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Labour has hinted that if France rejects the EU constitutional treaty in its upcoming referendum (as the polls suggest it might) then <a href=\"http:\/\/politics.guardian.co.uk\/election\/story\/0,15803,1462256,00.html\">the UK won&#8217;t have to hold one of its own<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Well, dur&#8230; Of course we won&#8217;t. If France rejects the constitution, that means it cannot possibly come into force. All it takes is one member state to say &#8220;No&#8221;, and the entire thing gets thrown out. So there&#8217;d be less than no point in holding our own referendum &#8211; unless, of course, you want to waste a vast amount of money on asking the country whether or not they approve of a treaty which no longer has any possibility of coming into effect.<\/p>\n<p>The only question is &#8211; why are Labour bringing this up now? It&#8217;s an utterly pointless distraction. Unless, of course, this is the first step towards launching <a href=\"http:\/\/europhobia.blogspot.com\/2005\/04\/will-eu-be-labours-secret-weapon.html\">Labour&#8217;s secret weapon<\/a>. The Tories have already said that they&#8217;ll hold the referendum six months after coming to power. Could this be Labour&#8217;s way of bringing up the contentious and divisive EU issue prior to the election? I wouldn&#8217;t put it past them. Say what you like about Labour &#8211; they&#8217;re not stupid&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Labour has hinted that if France rejects the EU constitutional treaty in its upcoming referendum (as the polls suggest it might) then the UK won&#8217;t have to hold one of its own. Well, dur&#8230; Of course we won&#8217;t. If France &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2005\/04\/non-story-of-the-day-or-is-it\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}