Can we believe Gordon Brown?

‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten famously sneered to the audience at the San Francisco Winterland in 1978, just before the Sex Pistols split up. Well, 30 years on, we have all been cheated: ripped off, swindled, stitched up like kippers. What happened last week in the vote on the Lisbon Treaty was a confidence trick of epic proportions.

By Matthew d’Ancona

First, and however grudgingly, all credit to the grifters who pulled off this awesome scam: it was a masterly political operation. Gordon Brown, David Miliband and Jim Murphy, the Europe Minister, played an absolute blinder, in the idiomatic and literal senses: they barely put a foot wrong in their handling of the referendum vote, and they managed, by keeping their cool, remaining poker-faced and burying the debate in obfuscation, to divert the public’s attention almost entirely from what was going on.

My jaw dropped last Wednesday as I listened to the Prime Minister tell David Cameron that it was time for the Tories to move “to the centre of Europe instead of being left at the margins of Europe”.

Rarely has Gordon sounded so like Tony. I don’t believe for a second that Mr Brown has become a true believer in the European Union. But - however much the words stuck in his craw - he was willing to say just about anything to get this one out of the way.

When the Prime Minister and his allies looked ahead to the referendum vote in the Commons, not in their wildest dreams could they have imagined that the headlines the morning after would focus on Nick Clegg and the Lib Dem split over Europe. Talk about missing the big picture: it was as if the press the day after the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 had led on drainage problems in Petrograd.

Much as I like Mr Clegg, I do not think his parliamentary management skills are of greater significance to the real story of Wednesday night: the denial to the British public of a referendum that all three parties promised to them in the 2005 election. The arguments deployed to justify this treachery were remarkable for their sheer effrontery.

We were told, first of all, that the Lisbon Treaty is not the same as the original EU Constitutional Treaty. Come on, guys: everybody knows that the two texts are so similar that any claim to the contrary is either sophistry or an outright lie.

It is true that some European leaders have joined in the sophistry to claim that the two documents are not the same. But the overwhelming majority concur with Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s declaration that “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.”

Next, it was argued by the Government that the Lisbon Treaty is no longer “constitutional” and so does not require a referendum. This is a moot point, to say the least: the deal establishes a permanent EU presidency, an EU foreign minister, wide-ranging extensions of qualified majority voting, dramatic changes to the “passerelle” or escalator system which enables the European Council unilaterally to extend its powers, and - perhaps above all - the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the precise legal significance of which Foreign Office lawyers admitted is unknowable in testimony to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee.

However, let us say, for the sake of argument, that the Government is right and that the Lisbon Treaty is not “constitutional”. This is, as it happens, irrelevant.

When Tony Blair made the original promise of a referendum to the Commons on April 20, 2004, he was absolutely explicit: the proposed deal, he claimed, “does not and will not alter the fundamental nature of the relationship between member states and the European Union”.

He was not constitutionally obliged to hold a referendum, he said, but driven to do so by the “partly successful campaign to persuade Britain that Europe is a conspiracy aimed at us”, and by his own growing desire for a grand reckoning. “Let the issue be put and let the battle be joined!” he declared. To be clear: Labour made the promise on the grounds that it was ready for a punch-up, and could win. So it is not that there was a constitutional hurdle that the original treaty cleared, but the Lisbon Treaty does not.

What has changed is that there is a new Prime Minister, who is not ready for a punch-up on Europe, and knows he would not win such a confrontation.

The breach of trust in shifting from one position to another is extraordinary. Three days before he entered Number 10, Mr Brown said that “The manifesto is what we put to the public. We’ve got to honour that manifesto. That is an issue of trust for me with the electorate.”

Well, apparently not. No referendum for us lot.

And why not? Because we are too thick, apparently. On Thursday’s Question Time, the PM’s close ally, Ed Miliband, said that all the technical stuff in the Treaty was really not the sort of thing to be bothering us dimwit voters with.

“I don’t think those issues are issues which people in my constituency want to have a referendum on,” said Mr Miliband in a performance of Sesame Street didacticism. “If you’re interested in improving democracy in this country, having a referendum on issues that don’t speak to people’s lives is not the way to achieve it.”

Best left to clever folk like you, eh, Ed? How fortunate we dunces are to have a ruling elite of brainy Fauntleroys to do our thinking for us.

It is interesting, too, that we now hear the Treaty does not “speak to people’s lives”, having been told so often by ministers that to jeopardise its passage in any way would lead to the downfall of Western civilisation. In fact, this particular Bill speaks to our lives in a sense that has nothing to do with Europe and everything to do with the drainage of trust from the political system.

Osmotically, this latest betrayal will compound the question that all voters now ask about all politicians: why can’t they keep a promise? Why has the Government that came to power 11 years ago with a pledge card become a gang of card sharks?

The battle is not quite over. This week’s Spectator urges the Lords to make imaginative use of the Salisbury Convention when the Bill goes to the Upper House. This tradition holds that the second chamber will not reject a manifesto bill at second reading. In this case, however, the Lords should demand, as a matter of conscience, that MPs honour their manifesto commitments to vote for a referendum and send the Treaty back to the Commons.

Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, is already talking to pro-Europeans and cross-benchers, urging them to see this as an issue of principle in which the second chamber has a moral responsibility. There is all to play for, and Strathclyde’s intellectual and persuasive powers are immense. But the odds are not in his favour.

In his book The Politics of Consent, Francis Pym, who died on Friday, wrote “the politics of consent are neither a luxury nor a soft option. They are the only form of democratic politics that will ultimately work or that can have a moral basis.” He was right, and it is a shame that this principle, so scandalously breached last week, has come to mean so little to those who govern us. They must be very proud.

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