The Tory campaign on James Wharton’s EU referendum bill has been very slick but very partisan – I examined some of the problems with this last week when eurosceptic Labour MP John Cryer announced he had been put off by the Let Britain Decide campaign and would abstain on the bill. So today campaigners in favour of a vote launched a cross-party campaign called I Support a Referendum. They hope that their emphasis on the referendum itself rather than the party politics will help bring MPs from other parties into the fold where previously they felt excluded.
Wharton was present at the launch, and he insisted that he was keen for MPs from any party to back his legislation. But he also warned colleagues from his party and from the anti-referendum camps in the other parties not to amend the bill to fit their own visions of the perfect EU referendum. He said:
‘The more time we spend discussing the amendments, the more likely it is that we will run out of time and we have got to stop that from happening using various procedural mechanisms. The challenge will be not just the amendments that people might choose to move which are easy to – not dismiss – but vote down… We can argue against that, we can vote that down… A more difficult amendment would be to change the date of a referendum by bringing it before the next general election. Clearly this would be something that many MPs would be sympathetic to, and it would cause problems for the political parties – all of them – in how they handle it. Were an amendment like that to be passed to the bill the challenge is then that it will start to fracture the base of support that we have for it. We already have a united Conservative party behind it to a man. We have a number of Labour MPs who are very sympathetic…. we have a number of Liberal Democrats who, although not publicly, are now starting to think about their position.’
Wharton is right that his party enjoys unity on the Bill, and he knows only too well that just one rogue MP could upset the balance and turn factions against one another by tabling an amendment. Remember that the party was starting to eat itself over tactics in the run-up to John Baron’s Queen’s Speech vote, and while a delicate unity has been struck for now, those factions could easily start attacking one another again.
Given the Labour and Lib Dem abstention plan, Friday’s second reading will succeed, with the bill either going through on the nod, or in a division where only Tory and maybe a handful of Labour eurosceptic MPs back the legislation. If that is so, it might be wise for Wharton to let his party continue with its Let Britain Decide campaign while throwing his own weight behind the cross-party effort on a referendum in order to win Cryer and other wavering Labour eurosceptics over. If he does not, he could find himself upsetting that delicate balance in the party himself if there is a slightest hint that he or the leadership prefers that the bill fails on the basis of a poor Labour turnout. That would be a good political campaign message, but those serious about the referendum itself, not just the point-scoring around it, want a bit more than that.
Comments