Britain betrayed over Lisbon referendum

Amid the continuing brouhaha over what the Tories should do next, this central betrayal should neither be forgotten nor forgiven.

The British have traditionally been suspicious of referendums. Although we have had half a dozen in the past 40 years, they are widely considered inimical to our idea of parliamentary democracy, whereby policies are debated during election campaigns and decisions then taken by our elected representatives. In 1975, the Conservatives were opposed to a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the Common Market. Margaret Thatcher, newly installed as the party leader, denounced the concept as a constitutional monstrosity devised simply to keep the Labour Cabinet together.
However, Mrs Thatcher recognised then that this might not be a position that would hold for ever. She believed that it might be necessary to call for a referendum on an issue that divided the nation, but not the parties, making a general election an inappropriate instrument for settling it. A V Dicey, the great constitutionalist, also saw a role for the referendum in the British system: “It is the people’s veto; the nation is sovereign and may well decree that the constitution shall not be changed without the direct sanction of the nation.” At the Tory conference in Manchester yesterday, William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, proposed making it a binding statutory requirement on future governments to hold a referendum whenever new competences or areas of power are transferred to Brussels – though this may no longer be necessary once the wide-ranging provisions of the Lisbon Treaty have taken effect.
In recent years, Labour has staged referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution, to endorse the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, on regional government in the North East and even to ask Londoners whether they wanted an elected mayor, hardly a matter of great constitutional moment. What they all had in common was that they involved a transfer of power on which the people should be consulted, as they should have been before the United Kingdom ratified the Lisbon Treaty. The treaty was pushed through by the Labour Government, not only without a referendum, but without any popular debate that might have justified leaving the matter to Parliament: during the 2005 general election campaign, all discussion of the latest great leap forward in Europe (then known as the European constitution) was considered unnecessary because the matter was going to be put to a referendum. The fact that it never was is not the fault of the Conservatives, but of Labour, which reneged on its election pledge. Amid the continuing brouhaha over what the Tories should do next, this central betrayal should neither be forgotten nor forgiven.
Daily Telegraph. 05 Oct 2009