Why bother with a pointless referendum?

Once again Europe is causing division within the Tory Party. David Cameron’s decision not to offer the British people a post-ratification referendum on the Lisbon Treaty has got the usual suspects quite annoyed. However I would like to defend Mr Cameron and make the case that giving the British people a post-ratification referendum on Lisbon would be as deceitful as Labour and the LibDems have been about their failure to honour their pledges when they had the chance.

Lisbon is now a done deal; there is no turning back the clock. With the Czech President’s signature the treaty has been ratified and Europe will now have its own President, Foreign Minister and legal personality. It doesn’t matter if Nigel Farrage became Prime Minister after the next election, the Treaty cannot be undone.

It is therefore wrong to suggest that we could still have a referendum after the next election. There would be absolutely no point in a post-ratification referendum whatsoever – it would achieve nothing. We would be asking the British people to go to vote in a referendum which would have no impact whatsoever. I think saying to people ‘go and vote in this referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and vote no’, giving them false hope that the referendum will actually have any effect, is deceitful – as deceitful as the Lib-Lab failure to vote for a referendum in the Commons last year.

Instead, David Cameron seems to have taken exactly the right approach and a one that should appeal to Eurosceptics. I myself am firmly in favour of Britain’s continuing membership of the European Union; I do not support the Better Off Out Campaign and would probably have voted yes to the Lisbon Treaty had we had a referendum. But the Eurosceptic mainstream in the Tory Party has won a victory yesterday; a Tory leader saying that the Conservative Party will seek a mandate from the British people at the next election to repatriate powers to Britain from Brussels and a promise of a binding requirement for future treaties to be approved by a referendum. What more could Eurosceptics want than wholesale withdrawal?

We should not kid ourselves that a referendum on Lisbon now would make the blindest bit of difference. The best Eurosceptics can now hope for is a Conservative Government after the next election delivering a manifesto pledge to restore powers to Britain, a pledge that would not need a referendum to substantiate it.