Eu Constitution / Reform Treaty

I am having frequeny arguments with a fellow activist about the EU constitution recently. He thinks that the issue is here to stay and that the Tories can gain some political capital by keeping up the pressure to have a referendum.

I disagree. The last set of meaningful polls about which issues people found most important, the EU came in about 10th with around 3% of the vote. At the 1997 General Election (i'm just going on polling memory here) it reached around 25%. This was at the hight of the single currency debate. So any EU debate is not high on the list of interest to most people. Also, the people who complain the most and think it is an important issue are the Tory supporters, which means they are preaching to the converted mostly.

I believe that the Tories are wrong to call for a EU referendum on both political and party political reasons.

Firstly political. They claim that 96% of the Constitution is the same. Well yes of course it is. The voting weight in the co-decision procedures and important reforms (which make up the bulk of the document) which shouldn't be thrown out just because they were in the original constitution. So the 4% difference is based on the constitutional bit, while it sounds only a small bit, it actually fundamentaly changes the document.

It is secondly, always good to have the Tories banging on about Europe. The government clearly wants them to continue on this line as they have done hardly anything to back the new treaty (so much so that Blunkett came out today saying they should be more vocal in their defence of it). Brown is simply saying there should be no referendum and Parliament will decide.

The bulk of the UK is, i think, pro european (despite what people say), we buy most products from EU go on holiday to EU countries more than anywhere else and enjoy their footballers making the premier league the best in the world. We like fining microsoft and BA Hundreds of millions for anti-competitive practices and we enjoy no-longer living in rip-off Britain. The press (Times, Sun, Telegraph, express and Mail) are all owned by eurosceptics that do not speak representitively for the UK population.

The Tories also miss the point that they are against Scottish independence referendum, which seems a little hyporitical.

I also think referendums are a waste of time and money. Only about 1% if not fewer have actually read the constitution and half of them don't understand the bulk of it. The point of electingv an MP is to have them work through difficult and complex documents and make a judgement on whether to accept them or not. Not just go to the whim of the "public" and whatever headline they are reading that day. I would accept a referendum if you had to read the constitution cover to cover first, then take a test on it. That way we'll really know how much people care and what they think after informed debate (and not just a media fuelled overreaction)

I say carry on banging on about the EU, it will make it harder to escape the "same old Tories" tag that Cameron has been keen to escape.