The last sentence of your editorial Halting a process (TMID, 17 June) says it all.

In reference to the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, you wrote “But this could ultimately prove to be exactly the problem that European citizens complain about – that the EU will not take ‘no’ for an answer and only rest when the people accept what is decided in Brussels.”

To put it crudely, the politicians in Brussels will not rest before they push a document – first they called it Constitution, and now they are calling it a treaty – that pleases their whims for power.

The people of France and Holland rejected it in 2005. The Irish people rejected it in 2008. And I am sure that many more nations would have turned the Lisbon Treaty down if they were given the chance to vote in the same way as the Irish people did.

Yet, I am sure that the leaders of the 27 member states will find the ways and means to come up with something else, change a few words and possibly the title, and try to put their decisions down our throats.

The Maltese Parliament has twice ratified an EU document which was turned down elsewhere. The Nationalists accept all that Brussels imposes on us, and Labour said yes simply because they do not want to be perceived as being against Europe after all that happened in the run-up to the 2003 election.

I wonder what the Maltese people would have done. Given that most of us follow what the political leaders say, I am sure that we would have voted yes. But we should take what happened in Ireland as a lesson.

There, most political parties were in favour of the treaty. And yet the Irish people voted against it.

Matthew Grech

Mosta