An important anniversary & your guess is as good as mine ...

It did take me by surprise when the irish voted "No" in the referendum they held on The Lisbon Treaty, exactly a year ago today.

But then again, all empires have to reach a high point and start crumbling sooner or later, it's all just a question of when the first visible cracks start to appear and which event is associated with The Beginning Of The End (such as the East German regime allowing their citizens to cross the border to West Germany or West Berlin in 1989). Taking another example, Indian nationalists had been whining (probably quite rightly) about British colonialists for decades to little effect - how would they have guessed that ultimately it would be the German and Japanese armies who would start a chain of events that would lead to their independence?

My personal view is that the Irish "No" was TBOTE for the EUmpire and that the Irish will also vote "No" next time around as well, but I'd be interested to know what you think, so that's the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll. Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

The relevance of this is that a majority of us believe that The LibLabConsensus will delay the next EU General Election until after the Irish have been forced to vote again; this is because everybody (EUphiles and EUsceptics alike) assume that the Irish will vote "Yes" next time round, thus enabling the next Tory government to wriggle out of their promise of holding a referendum in the UK - the logic being that you can't have a retrospective referendum, which is nonsense of course, as the 1975 referendum on membership of The Common Market was also retrospective: we joined The Common Market in 1973.

Of course, the Irish are not just being bullied, they are being bribed with all sorts of financial goodies and the promise of various opt-outs. There's some interesting background reading in today's Telegraph, the upshot being that "Britain may have to approve the Lisbon Treaty for a second time if the EU grants Ireland substantial concessions in an attempt to persuade its voters to back it in a referendum later this year", i.e. the EUmpire has reached the self-destructive stage where to gain more power it is having to relinquish other powers.

We'll see, I suppose. As a keen amateur historian, I find it all rather fascinating.