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Saturday 11 October 2008

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report - "Britain should have a referendum on the EU Treaty"

Lloyd Evans reports on the latest Intelligence Squared debate

Motion:
Britain should have a referendum on the EU treaty.

Chair:
Andrew Neil
 
For the motion:
Neil O’Brien
Andrew Roberts
Rt Hon Lord Lamont of Lerwick
 
Against the motion : 
Sir Stephen Wall
Vernon Bogdanor CBE
David Aaronovitch. 

It was like an eclipse. Wednesday’s debate on the EU referendum exactly coincided with a parliamentary vote on the same issue. ‘Over at the Palace of Varieties,’ prophesied Andrew Neil, in the chair, ‘the debate will be dull, predictable and whipped. But here at Intelligence Squared it’ll be lively, wild, and with no foregone conclusion.’ So it proved. This was the rowdiest debate of the season. At one point punches were almost exchanged.

It started with football terrace cheers for Neil O’Brien, a fresh-faced lad who co-founded the ‘I Want A Referendum’ campaign and is blessed with a silver tongue. He said that the essential similarities between the Lisbon treaty and the constitution were revealed by Giscard d’Estaing who let slip that , ‘Public opinion will be led to adopt the provisions of the constitution without them knowing it.’ O’Brien may be a keen European but he regrets transferring power to the EU just when its gravest inefficiencies have been exposed, especially the hopeless Common Agricultural Policy, (‘costing each household £2,500 a year’), the ‘travelling circus between Brussels and Luxembourg’, and a culture of corruption so deeply ingrained that the EU’s auditors can’t sign off on their own accounts. The south Kensington crowd cheered passionately.

Sir Stephen Wall led for the opposition. An upright, slender and very civil-looking civil servant, Sir Stephen reminded us that ‘ever closer union’ had been anticipated by Ted Heath when he took us into Europe, and by Mrs Thatcher when she signed the Single European Act. The Lisbon Treaty gave us strength in numbers, he said, on the key issues of climate change, energy security, and migration.

Answering him, the historian Andrew Roberts was greeted by loud home-turf applause. He quoted Heath’s assurance that joining Europe would involve ‘no significant transfer of national sovereignty,’ and suggested that Britain wouldn’t have joined the EU ‘had we known what it would metamorphise into.’ Mr Roberts, who seems amusingly intrigued by pedigree, assured us that we had nothing to fear from referendums. ‘They’re as British as fish and chips. In fact, there’s nothing plebby about a plebiscite.’ He laced his historical survey with political quips. ‘If you’re at dinner with MPs the conversation soars as soon as they go off to vote at 10 pm.’ Everyone loved that.
 
Vernon Bogdanor, an Oxford professor of government, made an eloquent and gratifyingly well informed speech outlining dozens of areas where the Lisbon treaty differs from the constitution. Giscard popped up again. ‘It’s the same letter in a different envelope,’ Giscard had once whispered about Lisbon. Not true, said Bogdanor. The key point is that the constitution was intended to replace the Treaty of Rome whereas Lisbon merely amends it. In fact Lisbon actually returns power to national parliaments, he argued, by empowering them, in certain circumstances, to over-rule the subsidiarity principle and to reject measures passed by the EU. He suggested that the evening’s debate was underpinned by irrational fears. ‘Ill-intentioned foreigners trying to do us down.’
 
The former chancellor, Norman Lamont, lashed into Bogdanor’s argument about ‘more power to national parliaments’. He invoked the ‘passerelle clauses, an ugly word for an ugly thing’, which authorise the Council of Ministers to ‘change unanimity to majority voting without reference to national parliaments.’
 
David Aaronovitch summed up for the opposition with a combative strain of satirical repartee. ‘There’s been no referendum on our membership of NATO –  a treaty organisation. Nor on immigration. Nor on the death penalty. Nor on the Act of Union in 1707. I haven’t had a chance to vote on that. Nor did my great-great-great-great-grandmother!’ Laughter and some angry heckles.  
 
During questions from the floor Aaronovitch was roundly booed when he suggested that people didn’t want a referendum. ‘Oh OK, you lot do,’ he said. ‘But some people believe the Americans blew up the twin towers.’ More shouts and yells. He said that the debate wasn’t about Lisbon at heart, it was about Britain’s membership of the EU. He struck a chord there, and he knew it. ‘What is it about this debate that makes you so het up? What’s going on in your minds?’ Yells of ‘Patronising!’ were flung from the back of the room, followed by shouts and counter-shouts and an angry exchange beneath the gallery. The air darkened with insults and ushers raced to quell the trouble. But the flare-up died instantly and decorum returned as Andrew Neil calmed the house. He invited us to cast our votes. 

A messenger arrived with the result of the parliamentary debate. There, the government had scored a robotic victory but our votes brought a surprise. The shining rhetoric of the anti-Europeans had been eclipsed. Partially, at least. True, they remained victorious but their support had been significantly reduced by Aaronovitch and his team of Europe-huggers. Not a cosmic change perhaps, but at least a cosmetic one. And where Parliament voted blindly, Intelligence Squared had decided with open eyes.

Before the debate:
For: 331
Against: 102
Don’t Know: 70
 
After the debate:
For: 303
Against: 208
Don’t Know: 1

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