WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report – “Britain should have a referendum on the EU Treaty”

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.