As the debate over the new EU reform treaty continues to rage, the Eurosceptic group Open Europe has stepped up a generously funded media campaign to pressure the government into holding a referendum. Eurosceptics hope this will be a first stepping-stone to eventual British withdrawal from the EU. A referendum would be the perfect political arena to spin our continued membership of the EU as fatally undermining British sovereignty and awaken paranoid fears of what former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell famously called ‘the end of a thousand years of history’.
Calls for a referendum rely on two main arguments: that the new treaty is, in reality, the EU constitution in all but name; and that its content will strip Britain of its sovereignty in key areas. Both are wrong. First, the new treaty does away with the political symbolism of a European constitution and, more importantly, does not put the EU on a completely new legal footing vis-a-vis its member states. Instead, it amends the existing treaties, as did the 1986 Single European Act, the 1998 Amsterdam Treaty, and the 2002 Nice Treaty, which were all ratified through parliament.
Second, many of these reforms are included in both treaties because they are sensible and uncontroversial. They include getting rid of the EU’s ramshackle six-monthly rotating presidency, replacing the current two external-facing roles with a new single spokesperson on foreign policy and giving national parliaments more powers over EU decision-making.
The new treaty is also a very different deal for the UK compared with the original constitution. In a highly successful negotiation in June, Britain demanded – and got – a number of special arrangements, guarantees and caveats for the UK on a range of policy areas from human rights to foreign policy. For example, a new legally binding protocol on the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights will protect UK laws and measures, particularly those relating to social and labour legislation. Safeguards such as these satisfied Gordon Brown – a Euro-agnostic at best – that the text would not warrant a referendum.
In the past, well meaning pro-Europeans and commentators have also called for a referendum in Britain on the EU, as a way of challenging the rigidly negative orthodoxies of the British European debate. This is a legitimate view though it runs a high risk of opening a Pandora’s box of obfuscation and media-fed nationalism, as well as handing a platform to fringe political forces from across the UK. If the government did hold such a vote, it should be based on the straightforward issue of Britain’s EU membership. It could be held, for example, on whether the public wanted the government to invoke the current article 35 in the reform treaty which, for the first time, lays out a simple procedure for a member state to leave the EU if it so wishes.
The answer to whether or not a referendum should be held on the treaty is in the unwritten British constitution, not the dead European one. Britain is not in the habit of ratifying international treaties by referendum, even those which touch on fundamental issues of sovereignty, which the reform treaty does not. Parliament takes decisions on fundamental issues such as war, euthanasia, abortion and so on. Hence it remains the fitting place for a tough debate on the important, but far less fundamental question, of whether Britain should sign up to a treaty largely inspired by British ideas of a more effective, less intrusive EU.