The rules and the wording of the referendum question have both changed this week. Again, the prime minister follows where his party leads on Europe If the David Cameron approach to matters European can be captured in a word, that word is drift. The modernising young Conservative leader who began by warning his party about “banging on” about Europe went on to concede the referendum that guarantees a year or two in which politics is all about banging on about Europe to the exclusion of anything else. Just after winning a new mandate, the PM gave more ground – abandoning his view that the public was perfectly capable of deciding two things on one day, to fall in with the anti-European demand not to stage the vote along with the devolved and local elections. He also gave alarmingly mixed messages on a supremely important management question, making tough noises to anti-European ministers before later encouraging them to believe they could campaign as they pleased. This is the context in which this week’s twin slippage on the referendum must be understood. The first move, acceding to the Electoral Commission’s rewrite of the referendum question was, perhaps, inevitable. Defying the referee’s request to shift from a crisp yes/no formulation, towards a choice between “remain” and “leave”, would have rendered the vote a hollow fraud in the eyes of the anti-European obsessives. The effects are open to question. In disgruntled times, “no” might have proved a powerful referendum rallying cry, as it recently proved in Greece, But the immediate effect was to restore the morale of out campaigners, who have been splintering into three camps this week, and to increase anxiety among some of the pro-Europeans. Continue reading...
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