Battle is being joined on what happens next with the Lisbon Treaty following the irish No.

The Irish are saying that there can be no quick solutions.

The French and Germans are calling for everyone other than the Irish to ratify.

The Czechs are saying that the Treaty is dead.

The Poles are surprised, but will respect the Irish decision.

The British are urging a new route. Lord Owen is calling for the UK Government not to proceed with the final stages of Treaty ratification. Will Hutton has experienced total melt-down and needs to be mopped up.

This is all in fact very simple.

There are now two camps among the EU member states.

Those who Really Want the Treaty.

Those (probably a majority) who Don’t Really Want the Treaty, or Don’t Care one way or the other.

Look out for the need to decode the tricky noises coming from the second group.

Many will say noisily that they really want the Treaty, safe in the knowledge that those who Don’t Really Want the Treaty will stall it, even at the expense of being denounced as anti-European by those who Really Want the Treaty.

The political and legal ramifications of trying to set up a Two-speed Europe go beyond calculation. The UK pretends to be worried about it, but in private says "Bring it on! Try having a top-speed EU without our money oiling the engine!"

Which means that if we want to keep the whole show on the road we default back to the Nice Treaty which is working quite well enough, and try to make some ad hoc arrangements for implementing some of the Lisbon Treaty changes which make the most practical sense, whatever they might be.

To help the EU be more effective, do we for example need an External Action Service, fleets of expensive EU Embassies squeezing out member states’ Embassies?

No.

There is plenty more the EU can do to be ‘effective’ within current arrangements and budgets. And what was so ineffective about the sophisticated high-speed (and bureaucratically ‘light’) diplomatic shuttling by Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance in the early 1990s in the Bosnia crisis? The plan crashed, but not for lack of EU effectiveness.

As John Redwood puts it:

What is it about these public servants that they arrogate the right to do the opposite of what the electors, their paymasters want? Why do they think they should be able to draw salaries and expenses of a generous nature in order to take more power away from us, and order us about in new ways, when we want the opposite?

If anyone in the European bureaucracy is listening, understand the mood of many people living in the EU. The economic performance is not good enough, taxes are too high for the amount of public service we get, and there are too many laws and regulations. Why, in such a context, do you think we want more of the same? We want change – we want more freedom.