European Union Bill

Nick Boles Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

We will not give a commitment about specific dates for referendums that are not going to be held before 2015 at the earliest. There are advantages and disadvantages to holding referendums on the same days as other elections, and it is certainly considerably less expensive to the taxpayer if a referendum can be combined with a ballot for other purposes.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

In the United States, where much more use is made of local referendums in states such as California, do not such votes almost always take place on the same day as gubernatorial, mayoral or House of Representatives elections? What America understands, which we somehow fail to understand, is that people are perfectly capable of distinguishing between different questions and quite like being asked to go to the polls only once.

[Mr Lidington]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I suspect that a number of Members of all parties can recall occasions when both a general election and a local government election of some kind have been held on the same day in the same place. We have found that our electors have been perfectly capable of deciding to split the ticket if that is what they wish to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lidington]

Although one can never guarantee against the utterly implausible happening, the scenario that my hon. Friend describes would require a commitment of political energy on the part of every EU member state, because the decisions subject to a referendum require unanimity among member state Governments. Furthermore, he assumes that the UK Government of the time would be prepared to accept and recommend to the people three different treaty changes, or the implementation of three different passerelle clauses, or some combination of those on a single occasion. That is unlikely in the extreme.

A more plausible scenario—although I do not think, from talking to my colleagues on the Council of Ministers, that people have any appetite for this at the moment—if European countries wanted an ambitious treaty change covering a number of different competences, would be to seek treaty amendment through the ordinary revision procedure. That is the instrument available to the EU for an ambitious, wide-ranging treaty change along the pattern of Lisbon, Nice, Amsterdam and Maastricht. In those circumstances, the total proposal for a treaty amendment—regardless of which city it was named after—would be the subject of a single referendum question. It is most unlikely, therefore, that there would be a multiplicity of narrowly focused referendum questions, given the availability of that instrument.

[Nick Boles]

On a related point, it is dangerous ever to underestimate the deviousness of those who wish to build the grand European project—of course, they are entirely honourable in this, because they believe that their aims are honourable. However, would it not be conceivable that a Government—a future Labour Government, probably—who wanted, for example to set up a set of common European defence forces to replace our national defence forces, might agree a treaty in which they also agreed to repeal the common fisheries policy, which Conservative Members would strongly support? Would we then have a single vote on a single treaty that combined some elements that this country would strongly support and other elements that it would find very difficult? Or would the Government still be able to separate the different elements of the treaty and ask separate questions?

[Mr Lidington]

No, in the circumstances that my hon. Friend describes, in which an omnibus treaty amendment is delivered under the ordinary revision procedure, there would be a single question. It would be ridiculous for the Government to present that to the people as a number of different questions, because the Government, on behalf of the United Kingdom, would have to ratify the entire package en bloc, or refuse to ratify it en bloc. The negotiation would have resulted in a compromise among member states on something to which they all felt able to give their assent, and they would all have to be accountable to their respective electorates for that overall decision.