In principle, I agree with Fraser’s admirable post previewing Monday’s debate (summarised excellently by ConservativeHome here) on an EU-referendum but I suspect that wily old Blairite John Rentoul is right to argue that there was no way the government could wash its hands of the affair since, whatever it chose to do, The headlines would be about a divided Tory party, come what may. Which is reasonable enough since the Tory party is divided. Granted, the primary division is between the Get Out Now team and the Renegotiate Everything team but the point remains: this has been a blunder.
The government has mishandled this affair and been embarrassed by its own backbenchers. Nearly half the non-payroll Tory vote declined to back the Prime Minister yesterday. In part this is a sensible reflection upon the seriousness of Cameron’s pledge to “renegotiate” Britain’s relationship with Brussels. Then again, the Prime Minister may appreciate the limits of such an approach and how difficult it will be to renegotiate anything in ways that satisfy the party’s right-wing. I thought it notable that Malcolm Rifkind made one of the more powerful speeches pleading with his colleagues to be more temperate, more reasonable, more realistic in their tactics and their strategy alike.
Nevertheless, this debate had one sigificant outcome: it makes an eventual referendum on some aspect of Britain’s relationship with and role in Europe more, not less, likely. Half the Tory backbenches voted in favour of a non-binding, wholly theoretical, contradictory and, in that sense, self-defeating motion. A significant number of Laboru MPs also defied their leaders’ wishes. The Lib Dems, however many of them remain, will one day remember they too favour a referendum. So too, overwhelmingly, is the press.
All of which is fine and fair enough. There’s nothing wrong with having a referendum but, lord, please let it be on a specific question, not some vague general sense of an issue. Still, politically it is now hard to imagine how any government of ay stripe will be able to avoid calling a referendum on europe at some point in the future. This was the rebels’ real victory tonight. As Bagehot points out William Hague and David Cameron actually agree with a large part of what the rebels had to say:
[Mr Cameron] and Mr Hague between them said there should have been referendums on previous treaties including Maastricht, Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, with both of them directly attacking the previous Labour government for failing to hold a referendum on Lisbon. That is a much more radical statement that it may first seem. I think (just about) that a straight in-out referendum could be won in Britain. But any British vote on an individual treaty would be lost. If Britain had held a vote on Lisbon and lost it, that would have been that. It is not conceivable that Britain could have been pressured to vote a second time (as Ireland was over Lisbon) until it gave the right answer. What then? Well, if the other countries in the EU had wanted to press ahead with Lisbon, as certainly the majority did, there would have been the most astonishing, profound crisis in British relations, which could easily have led to Britain falling out of the club.
The rebels tonight will find it hard to credit, as the whips browbeat and threaten them. But this is a seriously, unprecedentedly Eurosceptic British government.
I think that’s true. Not yet Josephine, but soon is not the kind of thing to enthuse the Tory backbenches but that’s basically what the government position is. You can see why the backbenchers may find this frustrating and why some doubt the government will ever honour its promises. Nevertheless, there it is. This is not, even allowing for Nick Clegg, a notably euro-enthusiastic government even if it’s not yet persuaded by the merits of the Better Off Out campaign.
So those calling for a referendum have the wind behind them. The question is not so much if but when and about what, specifically.
One final point: there were a number of excellent speeches – Hague, Rifkind and Graham Stuart on the government side, Kate Hoey and others on the rebel ship – and the debate was surprisingly entertaining. Too many of the 2010 intake were reading their speeches but, on the whole, the debate showed Westminster in a pretty good light. There’s life in the old place yet.
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