European Union Referendum
Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2011 7:09 am
Voters have been cheated over the European Union for too long.
Let them decide
David Cameron should allow his MPs a free vote on whether to hold a referendum on membership of the EU.
By Charles Moore
12:01AM BST 22 Oct 2011
The Coalition recently introduced a system by which a petition with more than 100,000 signatures can force a debate in the House of Commons. Next week, on Monday, such a petition has triggered a debate on whether there should be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The options in the referendum would be: in, out or renegotiate.
So popular demand has put a question before Parliament, and backbenchers, as the new law also provides, have created a motion based on that popular demand. On the face of it, there would seem to be a chance that popular demand might prevail.
A happy situation for all the parties, you might think, since, at the last general election, all three of them were committed to referendums on Europe. At that time, the Liberal Democrats launched their own petition which said: “Liberal Democrats believe we should have a real vote on Europe – whether we should be in Europe or not. We have been blocked from having a vote on this in Parliament.”
But no, on Monday all three parties will whip their MPs to vote against the petition which the reform has invited and the policy which they all gave us the impression, last time they asked for our votes, that they supported. If you ask the Liberal Democrats why they have changed, they say that their demand for an in/out referendum has been dropped as part of the Coalition Agreement. If you ask the Conservatives, they say that an in/out referendum is more than the Liberal Democrats could stand.
The Tory high command feels so strongly that a referendum should not be voted for that it has arranged to change the date of the debate so that David Cameron and William Hague, who are going to Australia for the Commonwealth Conference, can attend. Mr Miliband, Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron are at one on this subject: “Don’t let the people decide!” It’s quite a slogan.
Mr Hague made a rather poor impression when he explained the official position to the 1922 Committee last week, but I propose to be kinder to him than its members were. It is always difficult being a minister. It is doubly so when you are in a coalition. And I know that “Europe” is a peculiarly painful subject in the folk memory of the Conservative leadership.
So I feel that, out of respect for these difficulties, we should all be as tolerant as possible. We should not try vainly to insist that Mr Cameron and Mr Hague and all their busy ministers vote for the referendum motion. We should tactfully encourage the great men to fly off to Australia early and avoid voting, if it pains them, at all. We must politely leave them to wrestle with their consciences, their diaries, their Coalition colleagues and their fear of seeming rude to all their eurozone friends who are having a perfectly, perfectly ghastly time just now.
But what we can ask in return is that they allow their backbenchers to vote freely for what most of them believe and many have promised their selection committees and their constituents.
Since the motion which the Commons is debating is non-binding and is not a piece of legislation, it is irrelevant to argue about timing, or tactics, or about whether the proposed referendum question is the right one. It is not even relevant for Monday’s vote whether there is a danger – from the Eurosceptic point of view – that the sort of referendum proposed would be lost on the night. It is all much simpler than that. The point is that the public feel that they have been cheated on this issue again and again. The first Parliament which has given them the chance to put this issue before it should not vote to prove them right.
Most people reading this column, I suspect, do not believe in government by referendum. We elect politicians to make laws on our behalf, not to keep scurrying back to ask us which laws to make. But the idea of consent is crucial to trust in the political process. For more than 20 years now, in European matters, that consent has been lacking. It has been in the interest of all the parties to make decisions which have changed our lives without offering us any electoral choice in the matter. Trust has broken down. Therefore our future consent cannot be assumed. It must be sought, in writing.
Therefore we need a referendum. It was only the referendum promise, after all, extracted by the intervention of the late Sir James Goldsmith, that kept us out of the euro. It is solely because of this that Britain is solvent today.
For all their desire to modernise, the Cameron strategists are in a time-warp on this subject. They still see “Europe” as a question of party management. Just like poor John Major, they think Eurosceptics are “bastards”. David Cameron was a young, harassed special adviser at the Treasury at the time when Britain fell out of the ERM in 1992. He knows that this was the luckiest disaster in our economic history. He is no euro-fanatic. But his mind, nevertheless, is scarred by the trauma of those days. “Europe”, for him, means lost votes in the Commons, Tory splits and three-hour speeches by Bill Cash.
He should be careful what he doesn’t wish for, because his current policy could have been expressly designed to bring back those days. Already the media, for whom “Tory split” is always the best default headline, are primed. Mr Cameron is provoking a confrontation on Monday which even Mr Cash (still, I am glad to say, with us) does not seek. He is putting conscientious euro-sceptic ministers in an impossible position. By choosing to interpret a view on an important matter of principle as a symptom of disobedient bloody-mindedness, the Prime Minister will bring that bloody-mindedness into being.
One of the images that the Cameron modernisers have rightly tried hardest to change is the idea that the Tories are smug liars. They do not seem to realise that Europe is a central reason for that image’s persistence. Right back to Edward Heath promising no loss of sovereignty 40 years ago, and right up to Mr Cameron’s “cast-iron” guarantee of a referendum, the public have been given assurances by leading Conservatives. Not wishing to be rude, I shall confine myself to saying that not one of these assurances has been fulfilled.
When this issue last began to tear the Tory party apart, a little over 20 years ago, the end of the Cold War made the European Union seem the coming thing. It was easy to argue – though it wasn’t true – that the march of history must trample over national independence. Today, it feels the other way round. The people who spoke of “our common European home” took out a mortgage on it which turns out to be unrepayable. The European Union may have been the future once, but today it looks more like the League of Nations or the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The public see this clearly. Yet still Britain is too timid to develop and prosecute an actual policy for the “fundamental reform” Mr Hague says that he wants.
One Government loyalist complained to me that a Commons vote for the motion on Monday would be “morally binding”. Given where we are in the history of our continent, our country, and our Parliament, mightn’t it be quite a good thing if it were?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... ecide.html