Liberal/Democrats for once must be held to account

In what passed for debate on the third reading of the EU (Amendment) Bill in the House of Commons on 11th March 2008, Mr. Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) Liberal Democrat spokesman on Europe made much of the activities of the Democracy movements leaflet campaign against referendum promise breaking MPs (see my first posting on this blog of yesterday beneath this). I quote from Hansard, linked here one small examples of the distortions in which he engaged: The third charge made by the Democracy Movement in the leaflet is that Lisbon creates a president and a Foreign Minister for the EU. As our debates have shown, that is also untrue. The proposal that the existing presidency of the European Council should change from a six-month rotation to a more permanent two-and-a-half year position means that such a president will not be created and that there will be no president of the EU who is akin to a US President. As for the lie that a Foreign Minister is being created, the fact that the EU has no foreign policy on anything unless and until 27 real Foreign Ministers from all member states unanimously agree shows what nonsense that charge is. The fact that the Lib/Dems are severely rattled by the Democracy Movement's campaign could not be made clearer than by the portion of this speech devoted to that campaign. Now the Liberal Democrats are preparing an even greater treachery against their electors in the House of Lords where they seem set to vote against a referendum rather than just to abstain as they did in the Commons. Lib/Dem peers, being appointed for life, are free from electoral pressure which is why the Democracy Movements campaign against sitting Lib/Dem MPs must be supported to the maximum extent possible. Anybody with relatives or friends living within a constituency with a sitting Lib/Dem MP is urged to pressure that contact to pressure that MP to ensure the peers of that party DO NOT break their party's manifesto promise by voting against a referendum amendment in the House of Lords, and should they do so the MPs themselves should be fully aware of the likely electoral consequences for each of them personally in each of the constituencies which they will then dishonestly represent.