In or out? — that is the question that a new cross-party campaign would have put
to the British people. And so they’re launching their “People’s Pledge” today. The idea is that voters would promise to support only those parliamentary candidates who back a referendum
on our membership of the EU. The signatures will then be enumerated, presented on a website, and — it is hoped — shock Westminster into delivering the referendum itself. At the very
least, it might persuade some candidates to face up to, and meet, the tide of public opinion on Europe.
It seems we’ve been here, or somewhere like it, before now. Daniel Hannan, for instance, launched a campaign last year to collect signatures for an EU referendum. But the timing of this latest attempt is slightly more resonant. It was only last week that David Cameron delivered a flat-out “no” to the idea of a referendum, disappointing Peter Bone’s wife in the process. And it has just passed three years since Nick Clegg pledged his own referendum: a pledge that was subsequently dropped, and which injects today’s politics with several doses of bittersweet irony.
So what about the numbers? A YouGov poll for today’s Mail suggests that the public is fiercely behind the idea of a referendum on the EU. 61 per cent back it, against 25 per cent who oppose it. And, what’s more, 54 per cent of respondents would prefer an EU referendum to one on the Alternative Vote. That’s considerably higher than the proportion of people who, in past opinion polls, suggest they would actually vote for us to leave Europe. Which is to say, even non-Eurosceptics want this referendum. It is, they must contend, a simple matter of democracy.
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