The father and son team at the British Management Data Foundation (BMDF), with this new publication, has once again produced an immensely valuable and authoritative encyclopedia of the development of the many EC/EU treaties. It comprises the full text of the Treaty signed in Rome on 29th October 2004, together with a comprehensive subject index, chapters explaining how the Constitution would come into effect if ratified, a section on British business concerns, summaries of its contents, a history of all EC/EU treaties since 1957, notes on the text, and a particularly lucid chapter titled “Principal Issues and Key Points”. Particularly useful are tables of equivalence, one tracing the numbers of the articles from the numbering of the old treaties through Maastricht and Amsterdam to the Constitution, the other the changes in the numbering of articles in successive drafts of the Constitution itself.

There are also chapters on EU Legislative Procedures and on which areas would change from unanimity to qualified majority voting, plus the texts of the Laeken Declaration of December 2001, (which set the Convention ball rolling), the report of Giscard d’Estaing, the president of the Convention, to the European Council of July 2003, and the contemporaneous pithy and astute “Alternative Report” of the minority of members of the Convention who were critical of its conclusions.

The text of the Constitution was still being revised right up to the 29th October, when heads of state and government signed it in Rome. Nevertheless, BMDF brought out this huge, complex and beautifully printed and bound book in just three weeks. As with its previous publications in this series, the book will become the reference book, the absolute ‘gold standard’, for ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, businessmen and all those who need to have at their hand an irreproachable source of EU law and regulation.