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National Referendum on the European Union

Although of course the Foreign Secretary and his party, and I and mine, come from different positions on Europe, we both made commitments to referendums, but both were conditional on there being a shift of power from this country to Brussels. It therefore must be right that, at the moment, we concentrate on helping our colleagues to sort out the European crisis, which is what businesses want us to do, and on getting our economy to grow again, which is what our constituents, in and out of work, want us to do. The referendum would be an absolute and immediate distraction from that.