On the process leading up to the revival of the Constitution, he notes that "It was the legal experts for the European Council who were charged with drafting the new text. They have not made any new suggestions. They have taken the original draft constitution, blown it apart into separate elements, and have then attached them, one by one, to existing treaties. The Treaty of Lisbon is thus a catalogue of amendments. It is unpenetrable for the public." He concludes that "When men and women with sweeping ambitions for Europe decide to make use of this treaty, they will be able to rekindle from the ashes of today the flame of a United Europe."

The comments have received widespread coverage in the British media. Page 2 of the Sun quotes Neil O'Brien as saying "Mr Giscard d'Estaing has lifted the lid on the march towards a United States of Europe." A leader in the Sun argues that d'Estaing "has blown the gaff on his beloved EU Constitution." A leader in the Independent argues that the claims are "the very last thing that Gordon Brown and his ministers want to hear", but that nonetheless Britain's opt-outs make the treaty different for the UK.
Sun Sun leader Independent Independent leader Independent - d'Estaing Telegraph

Pledges to maintain restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has admitted it was "bad" that the wrong figures were given out on immigrants working in the UK. Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain was forced to apologise after admitting that the increase in foreign nationals working in the UK since 1997 was 1.1 million, 300,000 more than previously stated. "I apologise for having to make this revision," Hain wrote, adding that the new figure was the most "robust estimate available". The figures mean that foreign nationals account for 40.7% of the 2.7 million jobs created since Labour came to power. A DWP spokesman said EU nationals made up just under half of the 1.1 million figure. The remainder come from other non-EU and Commonwealth countries, including the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, will pledge to maintain the UK's restrictions on low-skilled migrants from Bulgaria and Romania today.
BBC

Comment:
A few weeks ago the Government was briefing that the current restrictions on A2 workers were likely to be scrapped. Now it looks like they are to be maintained - for reasons which are nothing to do with Bulgaria or Romania...The Government said at the start of the year that it would restrict A2 access to the labour market to a quota of 10,000. But by June 14,500 A2 nationals had applied for National Insurance numbers (and this is likely to represent a very small proportion of A2 nationals actually in the UK). In the context of EU free movement law, there is no point attempting to control migration by using work permits. Bulgarians and Romanians are simply going to be used as a political football in a much bigger debate. Any "controls" the Government adopts on the A2 will be transitional and will change the total number of foreign workers in the UK by a fraction of 1%. Failing to collect meaningful data on numbers, and then attempting to impose meaningless controls which don't actually work undermines trust, rather than reassuring the public.

Rubbish charging given go-ahead to avoid European Commission fines
Councils in England are to be given the power to introduce pilot schemes to charge households according to the amount of rubbish they throw away. It comes as MPs warn the UK could face fines of up to £180m a year from the European Commission if it does not cut the amount of waste dumped in landfill.
BBC
Site comment:
And here's me thinking we made our laws

"Yorkshire for a Referendum" launches
The "Yorkshire for a Referendum" campaign - a regional branch of I Want a Referendum - launched yesterday in Sheffield and Leeds. The Yorkshire Post quotes Victor Watson, Chairman of Yorkshire for a Referendum, saying: "This new treaty hands over considerable areas of decision making to unelected politicians in Brussels. The referendum debate goes to the heart of the way we are governed. We elect our MPs to govern on our behalf; if they want to give away their responsibility to European institutions, they should ask us first. Gordon Brown must keep his promise if he wants to prove he is serious when he talks about listening to people and restoring trust in politics."
Yorkshire Post

Stephen Glover: Independent should have said it was reprinting FCO briefing
In the Independent's media section, Stephen Glover (a founding editor of the paper) looks at the paper's almost "verbatim reprinting" - spotted by Open Europe - of a Foreign Office note in an article debunking "10 myths about the EU treaty". Glover discards the editor's defence that it was a reprint of a "collection of facts", arguing that "unusually for a columnist on this paper, I am a Eurosceptic, but I don't think this makes any difference to my argument. The Independent was not, of course, reproducing facts, but an interpretation of facts. Whether this interpretation was correct or not is beside the point."

He argues, "Imagine how we would feel if the Daily Mail or The Daily Telegraph reproduced a Tory briefing note without attribution. Even if we agreed with the interpretation, we would feel that we had been wrongly kept in the dark. How much stronger would we have felt this if these newspapers had passed off an official policy paper as their own work when the Tories were in power? A newspaper is perfectly within its rights in agreeing with the Government of the day, but if it directly borrows its arguments it should say so."
Independent