On 1 December 2009 the Treaty of Lisbon came into force. As with previous treaties aimed at reforming the European Union (EU), Lisbon attracted conflicting assessments of its significance. For Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, it was ‘a rotten treaty…a smokescreen for the accretion of establishment power’. The Daily Telegraph concurred: ‘more of Britain’s powers surrendered to Brussels’, it claimed. The Sun’s headline screamed: ‘Britain betrayed as hated EU treaty becomes law.’
The treaty’s supporters were more laid back. Timothy Garton Ash, in the Guardian, expressed his delight at the treaty’s entry into force, adding that the new treaty was no ‘great leap forward’, nor did it create ‘the federal superstate of eurosceptic nightmare’. For Manuel José Barroso, President of European Commission, Lisbon was providing the EU with ‘the right institutions to act and a period of stability’ so that the EU could ‘focus all [its] energies on delivering what matters to our citizens’.
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