The Brits and the French know how to play the game, a German diplomat embroiled in the European Union treaty negotiations told me last week. “We know we can rely on them. But the Poles, they are something else. I am not sure they understand the game at all.”

Well, bravo for the Poles. They come fresh to the labyrinthine process of EU negotiations with a firmer grasp of their national interest than the current occupant of 10 Downing Street. Their reluctance to let Germany grant itself significantly greater voting power makes it Warsaw 1, Berlin 0, as today’s EU summit kicks off. Intransigent? Yes. Unacceptable? No.

Look at France’s beloved Common Agricultural Policy. While EU leaders congratulate themselves on creating a foreign aid programme, recently branded one of the most wasteful and inefficient in the world, 40 per cent of the EU’s entire budget is still spent subsidising European farmers to keep African food out of the market. What hypocrisy.

On Tuesday, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, told Poland that it risked losing money and support if it blocked a deal to reform the EU’s institutions. What, for exercising its democratic right to object? That is blackmail. Unlike Lech Kaczynski, the President of Poland, Mr Barroso is not elected. The money he threatens to remove belongs primarily to British, Dutch, French, Italian and German taxpayers. What do those who foot the EU’s bills think about a new voting system that will not only change the relative voting power of different countries, but also dramatically reduce the power of individual nations to stop legislation, by raising the threshold for a blocking coalition? Do they agree with Brussels that we must make it easier for the EU to pass more laws?

A bluffer's guide to the EU treaty

Our correspondent hacks through the verbiage to explain what happened at the EU summit and what it means

• Patchwork deal proves Europe cannot heal its deepest wounds

BACKGROUND

• Unconstitutional

• Fresh start or revived constitution?

• Merkel’s dream; Britain’s nightmare

• Brown’s first test: how to avoid an EU constitution

• Europe divided over summit plans

The Dutch don’t. Their perfectly reasonable “red card” proposal, which would allow a majority of national parliaments to block legislation that they did not like, has been dismissed out of hand. “The Dutch climbed a few trees and we now have to get them back down again,” an EU ambassador in Brussels said this week.

That is how Europe’s political elite views its citizens: they don’t know what’s good for them. Best to keep them out of it. As Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has said, better to use “different terminology without changing the legal substance” of the old constitution, then present it to the public as an “amending treaty” that no longer requires a referendum.

What fools they take us for. Do they really think that they can sustain the fiction that this “treaty” is essential for the EU to function, and yet so unimportant as to not be worth us bothering our little heads about? Do they expect us to believe that a document cleansed of the word “constitution”, but that still incorporates a full-time EU president and foreign minister, gives the power to make international treaties, and overrides national parliaments on criminal law, employment law, social policy and immigration (to name but a few), is so different from the one that Dutch and French voters rejected two years ago?

Britain has pushed through the enlargement of the Union, it must therefore accept a change in voting weights. But it need not accept the higher thresholds for blocking legislation that could prevent us keeping out measures such as the Working Time Directive.

Claims of gridlock are much exaggerated. Since the constitution was voted down two years ago, the EU has created the world’s first emissions trading scheme and the European Defence Agency. Sciences Po, the Paris institute, says that the EU has been adopting new rules and regulations 25 per cent faster since enlargement. But clearly not fast enough for those who fear that the federalist project may falter if anyone has time to think.

In Britain, no one under 50 has had a chance to vote in a referendum on the direction of the EU. Yet those whom we elect as temporary holders of political office blithely continue to hand power permanently to unelected institutions. Whether this treaty ends up being a giant leap towards greater integration or just another step on the way is a less important distinction than it may appear. Each step hands power to the European Court of Justice, which seizes every opportunity to expand its domain, including slowly eroding national vetoes on tax. Our leaders give away more power then they realise.

Unlike most MPs, I read every page of the original constitution. The loopholes are legion. Take the charter of fundamental rights, which Tony Blair has said Britain will never sign up to. It enshrines employment and social rights that would turn our clock back 30 years and grant workers co-decision powers in the businesses that employ them. Germany wants to leave the charter out of the new treaty but to include a reference that will make it legally binding nevertheless. Mr Blair wants a paragraph to exempt Britain. But lawyers tell me that it would be almost impossible to make the wording watertight. Oh, and the charter could come in by the back door, through powers to coordinate member states’ “economic and employment policies”.

The EU should have grown out of trying to define national issues as European. It should be focusing on the few big challenges, such as climate change and trade, that are truly international. As Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s confidant, put it in a recent pamphlet, we must stop doing “ ‘more EU’ for the sake of it”. Mr Brown himself must not condone the arrogance of those who act as though the Dutch and French had never voted. He must promise a referendum. It would not be a referendum on his premiership, as he may fear, but a chance to restrain an EU elite that has proved its total disregard for democracy.

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