Crack open the Guinness!

Behind all the lamentations about the end of European civilisation as brought about by a selfish micro-number of Irish voters, there will be lots of secret smiles.

One of the key issues in the whole Treaty saga has been reweighting the voting as between EU member states. The Nice Treaty was a serious bamboozling of the Germans by almost everyone else, as somehow the Germans agreed that they and the French, Brits and Italians would have 29 votes each, whereas Poland and Spain would have 27.

In other words, Germany with some 80 million people got only two more votes than Poland/Spain with fewer than 40 million! Lisbon corrected that significantly.

The French have always been keen to keep voting parity with Germany for We Are The Axis of Europe vanity reasons, so they will shed few very tears if the Nice voting formula stays around for rather longer. Ditto Italy.

Poland will be secretly (or not so secretly) delighted with the Irish result – the Nice Treaty really suits Poland.

The Brits have to pretend to be disappointed and make unconvincing ‘business as usual’ noises. But there are very few people in the UK who actually want the Lisbon Treaty, even if some people can gloomily go along with it and most people do not want it. Not to mention the (for some) politically awkward fact that the Irish vote vindicates the position of those who demanded a referndum in the UK too.

Meanwhile all sorts of other structures and people in Brussels will pretend not to be be happy that the treaty has hit another rock, but privately cheer the Irish – too much disruption was looming.

Germany ends up looking frustrated, wanting the Treaty for voting reweighting reasons and because they had invested such an effort in trying to achieve this.

And the Real Losers are ..?

… the European Parliament who were set to extend their influence – and their evil ambitions to regulate blogging – as their moral legitimacy dwindles.

Boo. Hoo.