Tony Blair’s last foreign policy performance at the European Union summit was as duplicitous as his previous acts.

He and his fellow heads of member-state governments had spun the summit as being concerned simply with tidying up a few loose ends over how the EU operates.

In reality, the discussions were about how to enshrine as much as possible of the rejected EU constitution in a treaty without consulting the electorate.

The whole point of the constitution was to give legal status to the EU, with its own president, foreign secretary, legal framework and neoliberal economic system.

It was rejected by the Dutch and French voters and would surely have met the same fate in Britain.

The determination of new Labour to proceed in a Eurocentralist direction without consulting the electorate was made clear by Europe Minister Geoff Hoon.

The man aptly nicknamed Buff suggested that Labour’s pledge to offer a referendum on the EU constitution could be invalidated simply by removing a single comma since it would no longer be the same document.

In the event, incoming Prime Minister Gordon Brown has dropped the principle of a referendum because the document cobbled together in Brussels is called an “amending treaty” rather than a constitution.

The member-state leaders, who broadly share the goal of an unaccountable, imperialist EU superstate, know that they cannot take the giant step that they planned in the constitution past their voters.

So they are prepared to take a number of smaller steps in the same direction.

That’s why the treaty provides for an indirectly elected EU president, a foreign high representative and an extension of qualified majority voting into 40 more areas.

To pretend that this is not a further stride towards a state called Europe is to insult people’s intelligence.

If that was not the purpose of the summit, then the summit had no purpose, since the existing Nice Treaty was quite capable of providing the basis for the ongoing expansion of the EU bloc.

Current arrangements needed no tidying up. The only tidying up required was for future concentration and centralisation of political power in the hands of the most powerful and populous states, namely Germany, France and Britain.

That’s why it provides for binding decisions to require the support of 55 per cent of member states representing 65 per cent of the EU population to be phased in from 2014.

The Eurocentralist elite is playing a long game, but it is utterly fixated on the end result and it is not prepared to be diverted from that goal.

Newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy made great play of striking out a reference to “free and undistorted competition” in the treaty preamble, but Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were united in their successful insistence that this still underpins EU economic policy. This is the basis of the Bolkestein services directive and other directives that undermine public services though the imposition of marketisation and privatisation.

This treaty, far from being just an amending treaty, is a further pernicious assault on democracy and popular sovereignty. It should be submitted to referendum and overwhelmingly rejected.