MARTIN WALKER UPI Editor Emeritus
The people of Ireland now have the fate of Britain in their hands. The deal reached by Irish Premier Brian Cowen at the EU summit at the weekend allows him to call a new referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in early October.

If the Irish vote "yes," and Gordon Brown's wretched lame duck of a government clings to power in London until next year, then Britain will probably remain a member of the EU. If the Irish vote "no," then Britain's disengagement is likely to begin.

David Cameron, the Conservative leader who looks almost certain to win Britain's next election, has promised a separate British referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if the ratification process is not completed in all 27 EU member states. The Irish referendum is one such hurdle. The German Constitutional Court is another, but on what seems to be a technical matter. The Czech and Polish presidents have yet to sign the ratified document, but all other legal procedures are complete.

So an Irish "yes" vote means that Cameron will probably not have to carry out his promise to hold a referendum in Britain. This would probably come as something of a relief to Cameron, who is happy to run against the EU when campaigning in Britain, but does not want to leave the EU altogether. The question will be how Britain can stay a member of an organization when all its other members have agreed to create an entirely new one, and Britain alone rejects it.

Most opinion polls say the British would vote against the Lisbon Treaty by a margin of two to one. In the European Parliament elections earlier this month, Gordon Brown's Labour candidates were beaten into third place behind the United Kingdom Independence Party, a single-issue party that says "no" to Europe.

"The treaty transfers power from national parliaments to the Brussels bureaucracy and would make Britain a province of a European state with a European president,"

comments William Rees-Mogg, a former editor in chief of London's The Times who speaks for many traditional conservatives.
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