Daily Mail, April 23 2004

When Tony Blair ate his words and announced he would hold a referendum on the EU constitution after all, there was no little amazement at the political risk he seemed to be taking. After all, there is overwhelming public opposition to the constitution. So why should he have committed himself to put his own feet to the fire like this?

At Prime Minister’s questions on Wednesday, we had our answer. Mr Blair was holding a referendum which might well go against him — because he intended simply to ignore the result! Challenged by the Tory leader Michael Howard on the implications of a ‘no’ vote, he said he would hold another one.

So when he said ‘the people will have the final say’, he should have added ‘and a fat lot of good that will do them because I will take no notice, and they will have their final say again and again until I get the final say I want’.

The jaw-dropping revelation that he would gerrymander the democratic process must have caused someone to murmur in his ear that this might not look too good. For by yesterday lunchtime, he was rowing back. Of course he would respect a ‘no’ vote, he said. ‘You can’t keep bringing a referendum back until they vote yes’.

But what would he do after a ‘no’ vote? When his own spokesman then refused to rule out the possibility of a second vote, the Prime Minister’s contorted pronouncements descended into chaos. But his meaning was surely as plain as it was unacceptable. If voters rejected the constitution, he said, he would hold new talks about it with the EU. But if the final say of the British people was to reject it, what more could there be for him to talk about?

The only reason for further negotiations would be that he would not accept the verdict of the British people as final unless it was ‘yes’. It is clear that after a ‘no’ vote he would seek to cook up with the EU some spurious ‘concessions’ and even more heavy threats, with which he would try to bamboozle and intimidate the public into reversing its decision.

He would no doubt be helped by his good friend Bertie Aherne, Prime Minister of Ireland which currently holds the EU presidency. Ireland’s own ‘no’ vote on the previous Nice treaty was itself overturned in a cynical second referendum, after the Irish government altered the rules on campaign funds to load the argument in favour of ‘yes’. Indeed, Mr Blair referred to this very precedent in his Commons exchanges.

Any doubt that this is indeed what the Prime Minister meant would surely have been dispelled by the quite surreal interview with the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on yesterday’s BBC Radio Four Today programme. For Mr Straw volunteered, in all seriousness, that a ‘no’ vote might mean not that the public was voting against the constitution in principle, only bits of it. In those circumstances, he informed us, the government would be justified in renegotiating those bits and then putting it to the people again in another referendum.

But it is the actual components of the constitution -- all the provisions that remove the power of national self-government, salami slice by salami slice -- that form the case against it. And anyway, since when did governments take it upon themselves to guess what was in people’s minds when they voted? What next -- a general election defeat that will be rejected because Tony Blair decides the public simply didn’t like a couple of policies?

Imagine the scene at the Palace. ‘Well I’ve lost the general election, Ma’am, but they weren’t actually voting against my government, just against one or two minor suggestions in the manifesto; so I’ll carry on as before and then go to the country again in a few months’ time, when I’m sure they’ll see sense’.

Breathtaking as Mr Blair’s attitude is, it is all of a piece with his whole attitude towards democracy. One should never forget that, in its first election manifesto, New Labour referred to itself chillingly as ‘the political arm of the British people’. Since in Mr Blair’s eyes he himself is New Labour, it follows that whatever he decides must embody the wishes of the British people and there can be no possibility whatsoever of dissent.

It is this impulse that has led him to centralise power so excessively in his government and in himself, and ride roughshod over our democratic processes and traditions. He is trying to destroy the independence of the House of Lords by packing it with cronies. He is trying to destroy the independence of the judiciary by abolishing the Lord Chancellor and bringing the courts under ministerial control.

He has sidelined the independent civil service by appointing political satraps to make sure his personal writ runs through Whitehall. He has all but abolished Cabinet government; indeed, the Cabinet was not invited to discuss the referendum decision until yesterday, two days after it had been announced.

He has shown contempt for Parliament by cutting short its debates, truncating Prime Minister’s question time and leaking decisions to favoured newspapers rather than making them to Parliament— as happened with the referendum, when he had to be dragged to the Commons by the Speaker to make his statement.

He also shows repeated contempt for voters themselves in the many economies with the truth with which he fobs them off. On scandals such as over Bernie Ecclestone, Peter Mandelson or Cheriegate, the truth has had to be extracted from him. Public spending has been double-counted, official statistics such as hospital waiting lists or exam results are manipulated, and the EU constitution, we are told, is a mere ‘tidying-up exercise’ -- an insult not just to the valid concerns of voters but to the intelligence.

What lies behind the Prime Minister’s dictatorial tendency is the fervent belief that the Blairite ‘project’ is far too important to be derailed by a little thing like the opposition of the British people. And that project entails abandoning the concept of a self-governing nation for a transnational vision, in which enlightened government is delivered by European institutions administering European and human rights law, with the countries of Europe pooling their policies on everything from foreign affairs to waste disposal. How indeed can anyone object, since we are all supposed to be part of a utopian vision of brotherhood that crosses national borders?

But that vision, of course, is profoundly undemocratic. It deprives the peoples of Europe of power over their own national destinies. Those peoples, not surprisingly, want none of it and are viscerally hostile. But their governments, who cannot allow the irritating obstacle of democracy to get in the way of their infinitely more enlightened vision, are determined to force their voters, by hook or by crook, to fall into line.

So when the Prime Minister looks us in the eye and swears he will respect our decision, he means it – provided he agrees with that decision. And if not, the resulting bullying, threats and intimidation to change our minds will prove he respects us even more.

Posted by melanie at April 23, 2004