Lords debate EU Reform Treaty Referendum

The link is here, some quotes: Lord Howell of Guildford moved Amendment No. 162: (and commented among other good points): It really is wearying constantly to be told that two and two does not make four and that black is white. In the words of my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke, with whom I have worked closely in the past, will the Government,

“stop all this nonsense about its being different from the constitution when it is plainly the same in substance”?—[Official Report, Commons, 5/3/08; col. 1785.]

That seems pretty definite.

Having listed all those arguments that are paraded, there is one reason above all why none of these pleas should be accepted: the Government promised a referendum, as did the Liberal Democrats and my own party. We did it in our manifestos in 2005. The parties went even further than the promises in the manifestos. In the Sun, the former Primer Minister, Tony Blair, said,

“we will have a referendum on the constitution in any event—and that is a government promise”.

As for the Liberal Democrats—I was going to say the dear old Lib Dems, but I am not sure those are quite the right words—we are getting used to their vagaries. My colleague William Hague had a few words for the anatomical state of their party in the Commons debates. I shall spare their blushes here; I think that these matters are much too vulgar for your Lordships’ House. However, their new leader, Mr Clegg, said at their party conference:

“Any proposals which involve significant change in the relationship between the Union, the member states and its citizens should be approved in Britain through a referendum”.

What could be plainer than that?

Every independent analysis confirms that the two treaties are virtual replicas. According to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, a very distinguished committee, as I know, 240 of the 250 proposals in the constitutional treaty are reproduced identically in this one. That very distinguished committee—by no means dominated by the Opposition; on the contrary, it is dominated by the Government—said that,

“there is no material difference between the provisions on foreign affairs in the Constitutional Treaty, which the Government made subject to approval in a referendum and those in the Lisbon Treaty on which a referendum is being denied”.

The amendment was eventually withdrawn without a division, here, AND more incredibly without virtually any media coverage of the debate in the days since then!