Desmond Swayne on the EU Referendum vote

I voted in the referendum of 1975 to withdraw from the Common Market, but I don’t subscribe to a sort of corrupt African democracy where you get ‘one man, one vote’, but only once. Anyone who is under 54 hasn’t been able to vote in a referendum on Europe at all, including my son and daughters:  nobody has the right right to give away their democratic birthright as free Englishmen. So, I am not against a referendum, on the contrary I am in favour of them, and that is why I supported the passage of the Referendums Act 2011, which recently received Royal assent, and now requires any new power given to the EU to be the subject of a referendum.

We ought to have had a referendum on the European Constitution – we were promised one but then cynically denied it. Frankly, we should have had one on the Maggie’s Single European Act, on Maastricht, Amsterdam, and on Nice. Had our new Referendum Act been in place then, all of these treaties would have been caught in the referendum ‘lock’.

I do not believe, however, that we should have a referendum at random now, just because 100,000 people signed a petition. It’s right that those signatures secured a debate, and I respect the decision of those colleagues to voted in favour of a referendum now. I disagree with them, first because, despite evident widespread frustration with the EU, I do not detect an overwhelming desire for a referendum. Frankly, I have had many more emails this year about Forestry and the sacking of the Lymington Stationmaster.

Opinion polls do show a majority in favour of a referendum but what the polls cannot tell us is how strongly the preference is felt, or how often the respondents thought about it before the pollster asked them the question.  Second, I disagree because the motion required a referendum on a menu of three options:  the status quo; renegotiation; or out. This means that the vote would have spit 3 ways and would probably have been decided by a minority – a real dog’s breakfast. I really do believe that referendums should present a clear cut alternative that will result in a majority for one side or the other. A better way to do it would be to renegotiate first and then present the result to a referendum, as we did in 1975.

Of course, this is a coalition government that has agreed come together in the national interest to sort out our disastrous public finances. The two governing parties have radically different approaches to the EU. In any renegotiation the Conservatives will want many more powers brought back home than the Liberal Democrats will be comfortable with, (and Labour by contrast has made it clear that it doesn’t want any powers back at all). My own preference would be for renegotiation and any subsequent referendum to take place under a majority government with a clear election mandate from the people, rather than a coalition.