It is really getting quite untenable for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to continue pretending that the new European treaty is not the Constitution, hence no referendum is needed. Yesterday the Conference of Presidents, the organising body of the European Parliament, had its first meeting after the summer recess. And what was on the agenda?

Conference of Presidents
Thursday 30 August 2007

Organisational arrangements for the ‘Citizens’ Forum’/Agora meetings in 2007

The Conference agreed to postpone the holding of the first Citizens’ forum on the Constitutional Treaty issues from 18-19 October to 8-9 November 2007. [My Italics]

So it now seems that even the institutions of the European Union have given up pretending that the new treaty is not the Constitution but the “Reform Treaty” or that, as we are told by Brown, Milliband et al, it was just a tidying up exercise with all constitutional aspects removed.