100 Tory MPs (including me) call for Cameron to prepare legislation for EU referendum


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Via 100 Tory MPs call for Cameron to prepare legislation for EU referendum:

Is the momentum towards a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU becoming irresistable?

I ask because, this morning, nearly 100 Tory MPs have signed a letter to the Prime Minister urging him “to place on the Statute Book before the next General Election a commitment to hold a referendum during the next Parliament on the nature of our relationship with the European Union”.

Of course I signed. I have made my view on the EU clear in many posts. If the EU confined itself to guaranteeing free trade, peace, essential liberties and the rule of law amongst the European nation states, I would support it, if it had a democratic mandate.

Unfortunately, it is a centralising social democratic state without democratic legitimacy. That’s why I oppose it: it’s bad news for all the people of Europe and that is why I support my European friends in the Initiative for a Free and Prospering Europe.

Thankfully, people are increasingly alive to the impotence of British parliamentarians in the face of the European regulatory machine. Whether it’s the airline pilots’ objections to the levelling down of our flight time limitations or the motorcyclists’ outrage at new anti-tampering rules for which no evidence has been presented, people increasingly realise the EU is the source of their problems or the obstacle to their resolution. The effect of the EU on our immigration policy is particularly poisonous domestically, but that is for another day.

It seems clear that the British people want their laws to be made in Britain, not anywhere else. That’s why I am encouraging people to sign The People’s Pledge for a binding referendum on the EU.

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Comments & Responses

5 Responses so far.

  1. David C says:

    Good to hear you on sound banking on World at One today, keep up the good work!

  2. Matthew Newton says:

    Personally I believe in a single democratic world government. That would be the only truly fair system. But obviously the way to that is not though a diversion into an unaccountable bureaucratic entity like the EU.

    • Steve Baker says:

      But of course democracy would have no meaning at that level, unless the state was constitutionally ultra-minimal. I do not object to ultra-minimal world government. The trouble is that it would surely degenerate into social democracy and become a tyranny.

  3. Matthew Newton says:

    I’m not quite sure that I fully understand your point in this case.
    But in general I think that libertarians like you, though I share some of your sympathies, tend to have no plausible answer to the following question: why would the tyranny of the rich that would surely result from the absence of a state be better than the tyranny of the state? Wouldn’t a minimal- or no-state society only be desirable in conditions of much greater equality of opportunity than are now the case?