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Leading article

Vote for honesty

Wednesday, 12th September 2007

The long quest to find a purpose for the Lib Dems is the modern equivalent to the probably apocryphal story about the child asking his mother about Lord Randolph Churchill: ‘What is that man for?’

The Prime Minister has been adamant that (unlike his predecessor) he will not change his mind and it seemed — until this week — that there was little chance of a critical mass being reached where he might have to. In an interview in Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, however, David Cameron shifted up a gear, promising an opposition day debate when Parliament returns in which the Commons will vote on a simple motion to support a referendum on the resurrected constitutional treaty.

The motion could be the start of a serious parliamentary campaign to force Mr Brown’s hand over the treaty. With a majority of 69, the PM’s position would be very precarious indeed if the Lib Dems joined the Tories and Labour rebels in their campaign.

The strong opposition which Mr Brown encountered over the treaty at the TUC conference in Brighton shows that the issue is not one of Left-Right partisanship but fundamental patriotic principle. It is also a matter of trust. We were promised a say, and now that promise is to be broken. It was striking to see Jackie Ashley, the respected pro-Brown, pro-EU Guardian columnist declare on Monday that the PM’s ‘hard-won reputation for straight dealing’ depended upon him granting the public a vote.

It is quite irrelevant to point out, as ministers have, that Margaret Thatcher did not hold a referendum on the 1986 Single European Act or that William Hague opposed a popular vote on Maastricht. So what? In neither case were they breaking a promise. Mr Brown has launched his premiership with a plethora of announcements about the ‘new politics’, innovative forms of consultation and citizens’ juries, and a pledge to carry on ‘listening and learning’. He was at the forefront of the election campaign in 2005 in which Labour — desperate to kick the issue into touch — promised a referendum on the constitution.

That constitution, Mr Brown and his colleagues insist, is dead: it is an ex-treaty, it has ceased to be. But is that true? With embarrassing unanimity, Continental politicians declare that the constitution is very much alive. Some even celebrate the cunning with which this deceit has been practised upon the peoples of Europe — the alteration of the cosmetic to preserve the substantial.

‘The good thing is ...that all the symbolic elements are gone,’ Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, has said, ‘and that which really matters — the core — is left.’ Vaclav Klaus, the Czech President is no less blunt: ‘Only cosmetic changes have been made, and the basic document remains the same.’

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