Jonathan Church (London, The Federal Trust): On Friday EU leaders agreed the text for a Reform Treaty, the successor to the rejected Constitutional Treaty. Yet for Mr Brown, there is a great deal of work yet to be done. The clamour for a referendum in the United Kingdom is set only to grow, at least according to its many proponents. Mr Brown will resist these calls. Like a snap-election, he would not call a referendum he might not win handsomely. And on this issue, he will at least be able to boast a consistency of approach. This is not to say however that the coming months will be easy. But if Mr Brown had the courage to make an honest case for Europe, things could be far easier. In talking of "defending national interests" and of "red lines", Mr Brown only adds weight to the arguments of those who claim the British are 'under attack' from Brussels. In the short and the long term, if the Government wishes to be spared such trials, it must cease its collusion with anti-European rhetoric. Were this Treaty nothing but an absence of bad things, as Mr Brown might portray it, there would be no sense in signing it. But it, like the EU itself, is not an absence of threats. Instead it is, like the EU - as every anti-European opposition party discovers once it forms a government - a positive development in an increasingly interdependent world.
Some will say that the battle today is over the question of a referendum; that it is no time to be tackling the deep-seated instincts of the British people. Yet without the Government as an ally, these instincts have little to sustain them. Besides, the two questions are intimately related. Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times wrote this week that it wouldn't matter if votes in a referendum were cast according to people's views of the EU instead of the Reform Treaty. This is a good argument for not having a referendum, but these comments reveal also that it is indeed people's deep-seated anti-European instincts which are driving the call for a referendum. A referendum is also popular because people feel they are not being told the whole truth about the Reform Treaty, and indeed about the EU. They are right. The Government is now living with the consequences of its defensive attitude towards Europe in 2004, when a referendum was promised solely to quieten the press clamour (according to Jack Straw). But it is only the persistence of this attitude today which, at root, underlies the current clamour over the similarities between the Constitutional and Reform Treaties, and which elevates this particular broken manifesto pledge above other unfulfilled political promises. Mr Brown is bound to have a difficult few months ahead. But how much easier they might be if he sold the Reform Treaty for the progressive document it is, and denied the opposition and sections of the media the fuel for their roaring fire.
