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Lisbon Treaty Offers Europe Hard Lessons And New Opportunities - : by Chris Ostrowski
The two biggest lessons to be taken from this is not to produce a constitution which is so far reaching, inward looking and esoteric that the people give it a big raspberry (as happened in the European constitution); and not to promise a referendum on an issue that need to be discussed as part of the mainstream of political debate. How right was Chris Patten when he heard of the Prime Minister’s promise to hold a referendum: “They [referendums] undermine Westminster……if you have a referendum on an issue politicians, during an election campaign say oh we’re not going to talk about that, we don’t need to talk about that, that’s all for the referendum. So during the last election campaign [2001], the Euro was hardly debated. I think referendums are fundamentally anti-democratic…”
The challenge has always been how to illustrate that EU is responsible for some popular successes and more crucially how to show voters that if we had a Eurosceptic government then the consequences would be damaging to the British interest. Two factors could help the government here. Firstly, and the difficulties involved in this can not be underestimated, it would be of great benefit if Government Ministers were to take the time and initiative to praise the EU and other member states individually when there is a success. It has always been the way that ministers blame ‘Brussels’ when something goes wrong and take the praise for the government when something is a success. But because we are faced with a Eurosceptic party which might form a government for the first time the risk of ‘losing’ a success to Brussels is actually diminished if the case is properly made.
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