Call for a referendum
Reading the comment about the House of Commons vote on whether there
should be a referendum on ratifying the Lisbon Treaty brought to mind
comments by David Cameron in a thoughtful speech he made at the Welsh
Conservative Conference in Llandudno, North Wales. I was there flying
the flag for Conservative MEPs in general and for my predecessor as
Leader bar one, Jonathan Evans MEP, in particular.
Reneging on a promise
Unless something remarkable were to happen in the House of Lords to
force a change of heart, it very much looks like Gordon Brown and his
Labour Government have got away with reneging on a manifesto pledge to
hold a referendum on this Treaty. On a matter of such constitutional
importance it takes quite some brass neck or chutzpah to practice
deception and evasion on this scale.
Sophistry and weasel words
The weasel worded excuse seems to be that the promise, the manifesto
commitment Tony Blair made in 2004, just before the European
Parliament Elections, and repeated in the Labour manifesto for the
2005 General Election, was to hold a referendum on the draft
Constitutional Treaty. When that text, rejected by both French and
Dutch voters, was cosmetically tweaked with very minor changes and
renamed a Reform Treaty it became a different sort of thing, at least
different enough for the Government to claim it wasn’t the same thing
at all and thereby rendered the promise, the commitment null and void.
LibDems in disarray
In the crucial vote there were clear signs of MPs wrestling with their
consciences and principles on the issues at stake. A significant
number of Labour MPs voted against their own government in favour of a
referendum. The LibDems were all over the place, equivocating like mad
and getting hopelessly confused trying to pursue a third option of
abstaining in favour of a completely different question for a
referendum. New boy leader Nick Clegg was losing front bench spokesmen
hand over fist as they defied his whip. This disarray became the story
of the vote, not the vote itself, and was a gift to Gordon Brown.
New Labour spin
So why did all this remind me of what David Cameron had said? He was
addressing the issue of why politicians and the House of Commons have
lost the trust of the public. Of course politicians are never very
popular with people but we seem to have sunk lower than usual in their
esteem.
Unsurprisingly he pointed the finger at New Labour and it's nearly
eleven years in government and described three factors in this
decline. Broken promises, spin and top down decisions imposed against
local wishes. |
Broken promises
Broken promises such as on the referendum, but there are many other
examples, undermine faith in the system and create suspicion in
people’s minds about all the politicians. Spin, the dark art of making
day seem night or just concealing the truth, is a vivid example of
Abraham Lincoln’s adage about fooling some of the people all of the
time, or all of the people some of the time but not being able to fool
all of the people all of the time. I have long thought the whole New
Labour spin machine was all about persuading people that the Emperor
was wearing a fine suit of clothes when in fact, as the little boy
pointed out with his question, he had no clothes at all.
Riding roughshod
The top down decision making, whether it is about ID cards or
regional government, is an arrogant way of riding roughshod over local
communities on the flimsy nanny state justification that government
knows best. So much so that even when local opinion is canvassed it is
ignored as in the case of the referendum on a regional assembly in the
north-east or the current series of local government re-organisations.
This is hardly calculated to bolster confidence in the system.
Are people really bothered?
What's more, Brown and Labour are not the only ones at it. The way
in which the other Member States of the EU reacted to the no vote
referendum in France and the Netherlands was redolent of an arrogant
disregard of the results. They said let's re-package that text just
enough to be able to claim it is different and then present the
tinkered- with text in a difficult-to-understand format so as to
confuse and deceive people. Of course, many leading figures said
enough to let the cat out of the bag but somehow that hasn’t seemed to
matter to most people on the continent.
Time for change
It seems curious to me that public reaction to this situation has been
pretty muted. It seems to me that thus far at home the reaction has
been a case of the dog that didn’t bark in the night but perhaps there
is a slow burning fuse as revealed by the local referenda on the
treaty. Perhaps people think they can’t change government policy on
this issue and feel they have been let down by the body politic?
Either way David Cameron deserves our support and public recognition
for his brand of new, optimistic politics.
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