On Monday 24th October the House of Commons will debate a motion calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. This is a multiple choice, ‘in, out or shake it all about’ referendum. I have copied the motion in full below.
“The House calls upon the Government to introduce a Bill in the next session of Parliament to provide for the holding of a national referendum on whether the United Kingdom
(a) should remain a member of the European Union on the current
terms;
(b) leave the European Union; or
(c) re-negotiate the terms of its membership in order to create a new relationship based on trade and co-operation”
I know where I stand on Europe. I believe that we should be members of the EU, but with powers being returned to Britain. The EU has encroached too far into our national life. Many of the rules and regulations it has given us are holding Britain back, frustrating us with red tape and adding costs to business. The European single market is important for our trade, and international businesses are attracted to operating in Britain both because we are a competitive economy, and part of the EU. We must though do much more as well to build up customers for our products around the world; particularly with other countries in the Commonwealth and new markets like China and Brazil.
So in a referendum based on the question being put before the House of Commons I would vote for option C. The question is though, is this referendum the right thing for us to do now.
Firstly, I think that if we have a referendum on our EU membership there has to be a clear in or out vote. In a multiple choice referendum what would be the result if 25% voted to stay in as we are, 40% opted to leave and 35% to stay in and renegotiate. In this case most people would have voted to stay in the EU, but the most individual votes would have been cast in favour of the option to leave. This would clearly be unacceptable.
Secondly, if people were minded to vote for the option to re-negotiate our membership of the EU they would not know if this is really worth supporting until we know what powers we can get back through negotiation. This is further complicated as at the moment we do not yet know what changes are going to be proposed to the EU following the financial crisis in the eurozone.
Thirdly, if the House of Commons is going to call upon the Government to call a referendum on our EU membership we should at least know when approximately we want it to be called and what the terms of our membership would be if we stayed in. We do not know this yet, so I think we should wait until we do before asking the British people to vote on it.
That’s why, as it stands, I won’t be able to support this motion on Monday.