Draw Breath

If there's one lesson that the government will take from the Nice treaty debacle, it's not that they should argue the case for the Lisbon Treaty. After all, with Nice only 8% of voters surveyed declared that they had a good understanding of the Treaty and it can't be much better this time around.

Besides, if they try to argue the facts they will likely end up in a mess. The Treaty is generally an unexiting, obscure and complicated institutional reform so there's nothing inspiring to argue for. More importantly no campaign is hell bent on a misinformation strategy (viz bullshit about article 48 of the treaty, or about corporate taxes etc etc) because they don't have to win the debate (and patently can't on the facts): they simply have to depress turnout. And turnout is the key to understanding why Nice 1 failed: the no vote barely increased from previous referenda but the yes vote collapsed, falling by half from the Amsterdam Treaty.

So what will the Government do, beyond bellowing threats at the electorate? They will run the referendum on the rights of the child on the same day. This element in the strategy was mentioned here, reporting Bertie Ahern's reply to a question by Enda Kenny: "If possible I would like to honour the commitment we made on the children's rights referendum." It's not particularly edifying politics (regarding either Lisbon or the rights of the child) and the politics of ideas it certainly is not, but if the gambit of running multiple referendums achieves its end of producing a high turnout it would be very difficult for the Government to lose.