{"id":4986,"date":"2004-04-28T22:38:17","date_gmt":"2004-04-28T21:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grayblog.co.uk\/?p=4986"},"modified":"2004-04-28T22:38:17","modified_gmt":"2004-04-28T21:38:17","slug":"lesson-from-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/2004\/04\/28\/lesson-from-france\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson from France?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty five years ago today, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/onthisday\/hi\/dates\/stories\/april\/28\/newsid_2500000\/2500927.stm\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"BBC News - On This Day\">Charles de Gaulle resigned<\/a> as a result of losing a referendum over constitutional reform. Essentially, CDG had linked the referendum to his own position as president of the Fifth Republic, turning what should have been a straight-forward referendum into a vote of confidence.<br \/>\nSomehow, the whole situation reminds me of what is happening now with Tony Blair and the referendum on the constitutional treaty for the EU. I fear that the campaigns will not be about the treaty itself, but more about Europe as a whole and also a vote of confidence in TB &#8211; something that I reckon he would be unlikely to win if it happened tomorrow. Let&#8217;s face it, the constitutional treaty is not exactly fun-packed or really that interesting to the populace in general &#8211; they neither know or care about it, but they like to have a go at something simple like moaning about the French, the Germans or the PM. A product of our shorter attention spans, I fear.<br \/>\nYou switched off already?!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty five years ago today, Charles de Gaulle resigned as a result of losing a referendum over constitutional reform. Essentially, CDG had linked the referendum to his own position as president of the Fifth Republic, turning what should have been a straight-forward referendum into a vote of confidence. Somehow, the whole situation reminds me of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}