A paradoxical event is about to take place on Tuesday.

The House of Representatives, which at present is composed of just two sides, will discuss and ratify the Lisbon Treaty on that day.

The two sides are busy right now going from door to door and canvassing every family in view of the coming general election, as they have every right to do. But they will not be consulting us on this very important matter: the ratification of a document that will commit us as a nation and which is important not just to the whole of Europe but also to us.

In this, the Maltese House of Representatives is about to do what almost all the other parliaments of the other member States are about to do, except for Ireland. The other parliaments are wrong and our Parliament is wrong as well.

As Simon Jenkins wrote last week, everyone but a fool (or a minister) knows that the new treaty is the rejected 2005 Constitution in all but name. Its architect, the former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, says so. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who negotiated its passage, says so explicitly.

Even at this late hour, it is still possible for our Parliament to stop and allow time for a national rethink, but what will most probably, or certainly, happen is that just as this Parliament, against our advice, went ahead and ratified the Rome Treaty even when it was quite clear it was doomed, so too will it do once again.

Let us refresh memories as to what happened that other time. The spin is that the Rome Treaty ratification was approved “unanimously” by our local parliament, so that must have earned us plenty of brownie points in Brussels.

The more humdrum fact however was that when the time came no vote was asked for and the ratification passed on the Nem. Con procedure, in other words that no one from the Opposition benches had asked for a vote and that the Opposition had even grunted its assent to the bill.

It has still been difficult to actually ascertain how many members were physically present when the ratification was carried in this way, but it is more than probable to conclude there were not that many of them.

Asking that the people be consulted before such an important step is taken is not asking for something impossible, or very risky or foolhardy. On the contrary, it is the essence of the European vision that citizens are consulted on the most important matters. This is precisely what was demanded both by the EU and by the Maltese as well - that membership in the EU was passed after the approval of the majority of the population and, in our case, this was further ratified by a general election held just a month later.

It was hard going, not least because the Labour Party, for reasons it now prefers to forget, especially in its present EU-phoria, decided to vote against. But it was the proper way of doing things. Why, especially now that there is general consensus on EU membership, are the two sides so afraid of denying us our say?

Let us quote Simon Jenkins again: “Any argument about any referendum is dogged by the outcome usually being predictable from opinion polls. At the present moment 80 per cent of the (British) public wants one, though opinion is evenly divided on whether the treaty should be approved. Nonetheless, its advocates do not want to take the risk. Thus to want a referendum is seen as opposing the treaty, and to argue against one is seen as defending it. The democratic case for a referendum as such is corrupted.”

In other words, the whole structure of the European Union is so fragile it seems that it just couldn’t be subjected to scrutiny by the peoples it will rule. The experience of the referenda in France and The Netherlands, it would seem, have led to quite strange conclusions - that it is better not to subject such treaties to the scrutiny of peoples because they will end up voting against them.

And, in the case of small countries like Malta, the last time when Malta had the last word, in Dom Mintoff’s and Gromyko’s time at Helsinki, Malta held the whole world, not just Europe, to ransom. It is quite understandable that neither the government nor the Opposition want this to happen again.

But don’t they see this would not happen since in our case, at least, since the two parties are ferociously pro-EU? And don’t they see that by taking decisions on behalf of the people, without the people themselves being consulted, they are laying the foundations for much mischief in the years to come?

This is being said of our Maltese Parliament, but it can equally, and more substantially be said of the other parliaments in the EU, which have even greater problems than we have here. It is through such fundamental mistakes that the whole structure of the EU is rending itself so irrelevant to people’s lives and so far away from people’s real concerns. It is through such distortions that the whole grand European ideal is adulterated. In time, the EU will have turned itself into a new Soviet and its grip on its citizens will be as fragile as the Iron Curtain turned out to be.

An EU that is afraid of the people’s vote is an EU that has forgotten that its ideal is based on democracy.