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European Union (Amendment) Bill

That is a good point, which has been raised during our debates. According to some of the documents leaked from the Slovenian presidency, many matters such as the precise demarcation of the roles of the EU president and the EU high representative have not been resolved. The stage is set for a turf war in the European Union. As I was saying, the Government's case has been that the first document was constitutional and the second was not—or at least, that was the argument until the Foreign Secretary opined on the matter last Wednesday, when he made one or two statements on the subject that were rather revealing. He argued that manifesto promises were basically irrelevant to the question of a referendum. He argued that whether to hold a referendum should be decided on the basis of the content of the treaty, irrespective of the manifesto commitments given—in contradistinction to my argument that it is not just the content of a treaty that counts, and that the overriding issue of principle is the manifesto promises that should be upheld whenever possible. The Foreign Secretary said that what he called the ““constitutional practice”” in this country was to hold a referendum when there was"““a fundamental shift in the balance of power””.—[Official Report, 5 March 2008; Vol. 472, c. 1777.]" To talk of constitutional practice when only one United Kingdom-wide referendum has ever been held is probably a little premature. When questioned on whether a referendum on the EU constitution was promised in 2004 because it represented a fundamental shift in the balance of power, the right hon. Gentleman said that that was not the reason. The reason why a referendum was promised on that occasion, and therefore was in the Labour party's election manifesto, was apparently to ““clear the air”” on the European issue. So after all the talk of constitutional practice and the necessity for a declaration of the contents of the treaty to be decisive in determining whether a referendum was held, it turned out that in the Foreign Secretary's own view, the Government of whom he was part promised a referendum not because of any constitutional practice or any particular contents of the previous treaty, but because they wanted to clear the air.