From last night’s Shropshire Star … 

MPs didn’t have long to prepare for EU vote 

MPs voted to give the EU not-a-constitution a second reading in a vote on Monday evening.  As sad as I may sound, I sat up and watched the debate and the vote on BBC Parliament.

MPs received the consolidated version of the bill they were voting on 4 hours before the debate started – not long enough to digest the hundreds of pages of text or understand the impact of what they were voting on.

However, rather than spend the next couple of hours in Parliament debating the bill with their colleagues, all but around 20 MPs decided they had something better to do with their time and the debating chamber was virtually empty.

Shortly before 10pm, MPs trickled in for the vote and in the end 586 MPs voted to give the EU not-a-constitution a second reading despite the fact that none of them had time to read what they were voting on and most of them didn’t bother to turn up to hear the arguments for or against.

The four Conservative MPs in Shropshire voted against the bill and David Wright, the only Labour MP left in the county, voted in favour of it.  Only Daniel Kawczynski bothered to turn up to the debate.

The EU not-a-constitution will be a disaster for England and as one MP commented, “this is the last treaty we will see before Parliament because this treaty is self-amending”.  The EU not-a-constitution represents a massive and irreversible transfer of sovereignty to Brussels and no MP with the interests of their country at heart would ever vote for such a thing.

Stuart Parr
Brookside

Technorati Tags: Letters, Federal Europe, EU Constitution