Peter Facey (with Labour in Bournemouth, Unlock Democracy): Well, I have just attended my first fringe of Labour conference with our Foreign Secretary David Milliband and Lord Neil Kinnock to name a few, on Britain’s role in Europe, organised by the Labour Movement for Europe. It was a packed and lively meeting but there was something surreal about it.
There was lots about why the EU was good for Britain and Britain being good for the EU. But there was almost nothing about the central question: how we close the gap between people and the European project (which, see dLiberation ‘Tomorrow’s Europe’ is addressing).
David Milliband said that in Britain it was for Parliment to decide, or as today’s Observer quotes him, “Sorry to sound like a constitutional traditionalist, but we are a parliamentary democracy”. Richard Corbett MEP said that, yes the Reform Treaty was 90% the same as the old Constitution, but mice and humans shared 90% of their DNA - and that it was the 10% that meant that it was fundamentally different from the constitution.
Neil Kinnock actually addressed the question of a referendum most clearly. He said that the Government had been wrong to promise a referendum on the constitution in the first place. Britain has referendums on proposals to change the way we are governed in a fundamental way, for example on devolution, elected mayors, and if we were to join the Euro. But neither the now redundant Constitution Treaty nor the current Reform Treaty involved fundamental changes to the way we are in fact governed already.
Though I have a lot of sympathy with Kinnock’s argument it does not help us when it comes to the actual disconnect between the electorate and the European project. Especially at a time when the government is saying that it wants to rebuild trust in politics, it feels wrong to be the only major party not to favour some sort of referendum on Europe. So my question is, if we are not to have a referendum how are we going to rebuild trust in this area? A secret citizens jury is unlikely to help, especially if it too is not allowed to discuss, let alone answer, the question, ‘should we have a referendum?’
