Dreadful deceit from Britain's Foreign Secretay

The Foreign Secretary was asked on the Sunday AM TV programme on BBC 1 this morning whether Britain would be given a referendum on a revived EU Constitution. I will post Margaret Beckett's exact reply when the BBC programme transcript appears on the web, but the main thrust was the following: Much of what the new constitution contains is already in existing Treaties therefore having a referendum would be absurd. Surely it should be perfectly clear that if that were true no new Treaty would be essential, it is the new powers designed to make an EU of 27 ex-nations governable on which the people should demand to be consulted! The completely ineffectual Andrew Marr, as usual, let this nonsense pass totally without comment or follow-up. The whole programme section on the Foreign Secretary was the purest BBC propaganda apparently designed to bolster the reputation of probably the most useless head of the Foreign Office in the nation's history.