Guy Aitchison (Bristol, OK): Pressure is mounting on Gordon Brown as calls for a referendum on the EU treaty grow louder. Senior Conservatives have been reported as saying that the party will make a referendum on the treaty a key general election issue - if Brown decides to call a snap poll in October or next May. This comes on the back of the EU Commissioner for Agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel, confirming that the old and revised texts were "as close as possible to each other". Open Europe, based on their own translation (the current official version is at the moment in French only), claim that the Treaty retains 96% of the proposed constitution. William Hague has even suggested that the Tories could back a privately funded referendum.
A Tory strategy along these lines was suggested on Friday by Labour MP Frank Field in an article in the Telegraph condemning the decision not to hold a referendum. Field predicted that Brown would not "call an election with the Tories giving a referendum pledge not equalled by one from the governing party. Either the election in the foreseeable future would be off, or the pledge made". A similar view was taken by Peter Oborne in the Mail who argues that a referendum pledge would "allow David Cameron plenty of scope to plan his fight back, to define himself as a politician, and to set boundaries between his own beliefs and the fundamental statism of Brown's Labour Party".
Meanwhile, Gisela Stuart MP, a former Labour minister who was a UK representative at the original EU constitutional convention, forcefully put the case for a referendum in yet another article appearing in the Telegraph, claiming it would undermine "trust" in government if Brown refused a referendum on a document substantially the same as the old constitution. This has nothing to do with the "so-called Tory agenda", she writes, but everything to do with a "new-Labour agenda" outlined in their manifesto. The Telegraph, along with Open Europe and supported by Direct Democracy appears to be leading the campaign. It is headlining a petition for a referendum which currently has over 30,000 signatures. But the call is also being supported by the Mail and the Times. It is quite a line-up.
Update: There is now an official English translation of the draft EU Treaty available here (opens as pdf).
