I've never created a blog post out of an email conversation that I've had before but then I've never really had any reason to. So forgive the laziness but as I've already written to an old friend on last night's vote in the House of Commons I decided to co-opt it into this blog post rather than re-write the whole thing.
He posed a few questions to me in the spirit of debate and out of genuine interest, below is what he asked me about the Tory backbench rebellion yesterday and below that is my reply.
Hi Matt,
I was wondering what your views on last night's referendum vote were? Not about the EU part of it but the fact that it wasn't a free vote.
I think that any e-petition that has raised 100,000 votes shows that at least a proportion of the electorate have a view and that MPs should be allowed to have a free vote based on what they think their electorate want, after all it is not legally binding on the government.
I know that last night's in particular would have caused some problems for EU negotiation but the government should not be able to force MPs to vote against what they think their electorate want because it suits the government.
Just wondered what you thought.
Regards
P
.
Hi P,
OK the online petition thing is a bit of a problem to be honest. Y'see most people would, if asked in any poll you would have brought forward between the 1960s and now, be in favour of bringing back capital punishment.
Yet whenever there has been a vote in parliament on the issue - which is extremely rare these days, I think the last one was under Margaret Thatcher - it always gets killed by the MPs.
Now you can argue that this isn't particularly democratic and many people would, but the simple fact is that if we had had capital punishment several people would have been executed in the UK for crimes they didn't commit. The Guildford Four, for example, and the Birmingham Six.
So there are things the politicians just instinctively know are either right or wrong and how the electorate and/or opinion polls and petitions can be manipulated to skew overall public opinion.
That's one problem with online petitions. Another problem with them is that the government only ever promised the issues brought forward by an online petition would be debated not that legislation would be brought forward or referendums had.
It's also worth noting that we have, in the UK, only had about three or four referendums in the post war era and prior to that they were non-existent, so referendums are as rare as hen's teeth in the UK.
Then you have the fact that those people that take part in online petitions are what the rest of us tend to call the "noisy minority".
It's very easy to get 100,000 signatures, from say within the membership of the Conservative party, and call that the will of the people.
The right of the Conservative party is far more activist than any other political group in the UK as well, so they find it relatively easy to "get the vote out" as it is called and appeal to their grass roots.
It's also very easy to poll 1,000 people and say, get a result that says 70 percent of the UK would vote to leave the EU altogether, if you target that polling on a specific part of the country, say for example Surrey or Essex, where the majority of the population of that county tend to vote Conservative.
Hold the same opinion poll in somewhere like Liverpool, which has seen the benefits of European membership over the last forty years through subsidies because it is considered a deprived region with insufficient national government spending and I'd wager you'd get a completely different result.
So my point is that polls and online petitions are easily manipulated to fit a particular agenda. Plus 100,000 people is far from being truly representative of a population of 60 million, it's not even 1 percent of the population.
As for instituting a three line whip. Personally I agree with you that it was possibly unwise for Cameron to have done so but for very different reasons.
The problem with this particular online petition, and the issue in general, is that it has very little to do with Europe. The backbench MPs in the Conservative party at the moment are extremely unhappy, one at being part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and two with David Cameron.
To be fair Cameron has never been the most popular man in the Conservative parry. A bit like Tony Blair, the Tories went with him because they thought he could win them elections, not because they liked him as a leader and they don't like the high handed way that he tends to deal with them.
Unfortunately it's usually the way with these things. There were lots of occasions when they would have got rid of Thatcher but for her popularity with the country and ability to win elections. It's why both Brown and Major suffered at the hands of their backbenchers - they weren't that popular with the country so the backbenchers felt they had nothing to lose through open rebellion. And in the case of Labour most recently they were tired of government and actually longed for opposition - much in the same way the Conservatives did in 1992 when they tried and failed to lose the election.
So for Cameron, the whip was a somewhat primitive tool to show his backbenchers who was really in charge and their rebellion was more a message to him, telling him he didn't have as much control over the party as he might have thought or wished he did and that they could cause trouble for him.
It's why they picked Europe.
They could have picked any number of other issues all of which gained 100,000 votes. To give you two examples and to stick to my theme from earlier, an e-petition calling for MPs to debate the return of capital punishment has already achieved 100,000 votes as has an e-petition calling for those convicted over the London riots to lose any benefits they may have been on. The first certainly won't see the light of day, the second Cameron has already said he supports.
The backbenchers chose Europe to show Cameron they could split the Conservative party and ruin him, his legislative agenda and legacy, and turn him into Edward Heath or John Major - two men he is beginning to emulate more and more with every day all by himself so you would think he didn't really need the help.
But the point is the debate had very little to do with representing the views of their constituents unfortunately no matter what many backbench MPs said.
Cameron was correct to use the whip in one crucial way. He didn't win an outright majority at the election and he's partnered with the most pro European of all the political parties in Britain.
So he a) would be risking his coalition because Nick Clegg - as a former MEP - would never have agreed to a referendum and b) more importantly he didn't win an outright mandate for the policies the Conservative party proposed at the election, which would suggest that most people don't favour renegotiating the treaty with the EU - if they did and this was the most important issue to the electorate, the Conservatives would have won a landslide surely?
The simply fact is that leaving Europe is not government policy, renegotiating the treaties is not even government policy in terms of the social chapter or working time directive - which John Major introduced as a Conservative prime minister in the first place.
On the actual issue of Europe if you ask most businessmen and politicians they say they would rather Britain took a more active role in European affairs or get out - one or the other!
But they know that getting out would destroy - literally not figuratively - the UK both economically and politically. The sheer amount of work it would take to decouple the UK from the EU politically would be staggering - you would be looking at unpicking over 30 years of legislation. Financially, the EU is our biggest trading partner but that only comes through membership of the EU - who would we trade with?
Successive governments spent the best part of 30 years trying to get us into the European Union and got knocked backed by the French on several occasions but both Labour and Conservative parties continued to try to get us in. Even Churchill understood the importance of Britain playing a leading role in Europe!!
Previous governments understood what getting into Europe meant - closer and closer political and fiscal union until a United States of Europe was achieved, however long that takes. That is the aim. Anyone that thinks otherwise is a fool.
With globalisation making the world a smaller place, with bigger trading entities such as the North Atlantic Free Trade Association, South America, China and India, the UK simply cannot stand on its own - we don't have the size and scale to compete on the world stage with countries like China and we can't just trade with them and hope for the best!
What happens if China imposes huge trade tariffs on our imports? How are we going to respond? Do the same? It would make absolutely no difference to the Chinese at all. But if the EU were to do it - that's a whole different kettle of fish, because the EU is the largest economy in the world - yes that's right the EU is the largest global economy look it up if you don't believe me.
So those who say we can stand alone are harking back to an empire that has vanished, a commonwealth that never really worked out and an idealised view of Britain's place in the world.
Moreover, reason for political union is fairly pragmatic - decisions get taken quicker. Right now the problem with the euro zone debt crisis is that the politics is way behind the economic realities. That's because there is no real political union, decisions take far longer than they would if we had greater political union hence crisis. If we even just got as far as issuing Eurobonds then things would improve. In the US at least four states are bankrupt, California and New Jersey being two of them, but because the US as a country issues bonds, as well as the states themselves there is no crisis!
I'd suggest reading a short book called How Europe will run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard. Don't get me wrong I'm not pro European because of ideological belief I'm pro European because I'm a pragmatist.
Oh and one more thing. Closer political and fiscal union in Europe has led to the longest era of peace in the continent in its entire history. So it stops wars too!!