The Spectator's Notes

19 March 2011

‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked.

‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked. I am sorry to hear it, because we anti-AV people were hoping not to be pestered by any young, optimistic people, but to oppose change in an elderly, unthinking and sullen manner. ‘Non tali auxilio!’, we cry, confident that young, optimistic people will not know what we mean.

But one might feel more optimistic if one could have referendums on subjects for which there is real popular demand. The AV vote is so obviously and solely the result of a treaty between politicians that it just isn’t reasonable to ask the rest of us to interest ourselves in the details of the matter. Yet the fact is that referendums have now become quite a large part of our democratic system. There were four referendums in the United Kingdom up to 1979. Since 1997, there have been 39. They’re here to stay, so let us have the ones we want. The late Sir James Goldsmith’s intervention in the 1997 general election meant that all the main parties were frightened into promising a referendum on Britain’s proposed entry into the European single currency. As a result, we have never gone in. Although we have been told by this government that we shall from now on have a referendum on any EU treaty which would take more power away from Parliament, it must be doubted whether it means what it says. On Tuesday, an organisation run by Mark Seddon, the former editor of Tribune, and backed by MPs from most parties (including Zac, son of Sir James, Kate Hoey, and Caroline Lucas) was launched. It is called The People’s Pledge, and it calls for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union to be the policy of all parties at the next election. The real power of this campaign will be seen in the selection of candidates. If constituencies can muster a few thousand Pledgers, anyone wishing to be an MP next time round will be wise to favour a referendum whether he or she wants in or out.

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