The Tory promise of a referendum has been doubly painful for me. First of all I had to explain that it was never meant to be delivered, and was only made on the (reasonable) assumption that it would form part of the negotiations for a second coalition, or similar arrangement, probably with the Liberal Democrats, and be dropped, with feigned squawks of reluctance.

The very risky nature of the Tory manifesto, full of pledges made in the belief that they would never be redeemed, seems to me to be absolute proof that Mr Cameron and his lieutenants believed (as I did) that an outright victory was impossible. I don’t think they wanted to win, as victory deprives them of a useful double alibi. It would be an excuse, first for not doing things they say they what to do but secretly don’t want to do; and second, for doing things they say they don’t want to do, but secretly do want to do. The biggest broken promise, as Tim Montgomerie rightly pointed out on Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’ last Friday, will be the unattainable pledges to pursue deep and rapid spending cuts. The Lib Dems would have provided the obvious excuse for watering them down. Now they’ll have to think of another way.

But while I was bogged down in this, I had to neglect the profounder point, that a referendum is not desirable anyway.

Plebiscites are a weapon of the state against the people in almost all cases. If elites think they will lose them, they either do not hold them, or (if they are only weak and incompetent elites) they arrange to have them re-run to come up with the desired result.

It is quite funny to note that there is ( so far as I know ) no instance of a referendum which has had the ‘right’ result (i.e. that desired by the elite) being re-run. There are many instances on the Continent and in Ireland of referenda which have had the ‘wrong’ result (i.e. one unwelcome to the elite) being re-run. Sometimes this is achieved by asking what is essentially the same question, but in a different guise, thus the EU Constitution is re-badged as ‘the Lisbon Treaty’, amounting to more or less the same thing. And it is then ratified in these countries which previously rejected it.

The exceptions to the general rule that referenda are not to be trusted (mainly to be found in Switzerland) are: where the initiative for them comes from below; where the government plays no part in timing them or drafting the question; where the campaigns are protected by unalterable law from gross unfairness.

Apart from the vote on ballot reform, which I suspect went unnoticed by millions of electors, the one instance of a referendum in the entire United Kingdom was that of 1975, in which I was a very interested observer, having been given the job of covering many of the main meetings on both sides in the town where I then worked for an evening paper. I am pretty certain that I became so engaged that I attended some of the meetings simply for the joy of observing a real live national controversy, the last one this country ever experienced.

Until the last hour, I was entirely taken in by the ‘Yes’ campaign, which appealed to the lingering Utopian in me (a part of myself then still thriving, as I had recently abandoned Marxism-Leninism, but which I think and hope has long since shrivelled and died, like an exhausted verruca). I remember especially being charmed and carried away by an idealistic internationalist oration by Uwe Kitzinger, wearing his piratical eye-patch; and of being appalled by a sub-Churchillian anti-Brussels tub-thumping performance (I think there was an actual tub. He certainly thumped something) by Peter Shore, who ended by growling ‘And damn the Common Market!’

On the morning of the vote I received at my scruffy bedsit home a very glossy leaflet containing lavish endorsements of the ‘Yes’ campaign by several local notables. One of them (her picture made this unambiguous) was a respected colleague of mine on the evening paper. But they had spelled her surname wrongly, very wrongly. I carried the leaflet into the office and showed her, expecting her to laugh at their incompetence. But instead she said ‘I never gave my permission for this ‘ and was quite cross.

As the urgent minutes scurried by towards our first edition deadline, I telephoned all the people on the list wearing out my finger in the dial of the old black instrument. I was on to something. Several others, likewise, had not given their permission. The response of the organisers was pathetic. I pounded furiously at my typewriter to get this rather important story to the sub-editors in time for the lunchtime paper. It was a friendly, small office and, if we were free, we reporters used to slip down into the machine room towards the end of the morning, to watch the lovely old presses begin to turn. I liked to see and hear them hammer up to full speed, enjoying the sight of the solid, saleable end of the process we had begun, perhaps days before, by lifting the phone or by some whispered conversation at the back of a meeting hall. In those days, it was nearly as thrilling as watching a steam locomotive slowly accelerate out of a station.

But that day I didn’t go. My story had been held out of the paper. A pale pink mist of fury and disappointment, purely the frustration of a reporter with a good story, still obscures in my memory of the precise events. I can’t recall the excuses offered, though the person offering them, normally receptive and reasonable, was known as an enthusiastic Liberal and Common Market enthusiast. I think the story was eventually printed the next day, when it had lost all its (pretty limited) power to damage the ‘Yes’ campaign. But I had one recourse. I stomped down to the polling station and voted ‘No’ to assuage my rage, thus being saved from doing a stupid thing without knowing it, more by instinct than by reason.

It didn’t make the slightest difference to the result, which had been a foregone conclusion anyway. At the start of the contest, opposition to our membership was strong, but a blatantly unfair campaign put paid to that. Membership, then as now, was a fait accompli and opponents had the immediate disadvantage of arguing for a ‘No’ vote, No major newspaper (then as now) favoured a British exit - and before wiseacres tell me that old ‘Daily Express’ (in those days a significant force with a daily sale higher than two million) was fervently opposed to the Market, it had indeed been so for many years but was swung round to favour it in plenty of time for the referendum.

Even the official pamphlets, distributed at taxpayers’ expense to all homes, were grossly biased. There was one for ‘Yes’. One for ‘No’, and then another one for ‘Yes’. This blatant departure from fairness was excused on the grounds that this was the opinion of the government. Actually, it wasn’t. Several Labour Cabinet Ministers, from both wings of the party, actively campaigned for a ‘No’ vote. Indeed, just as the repeatedly-offered Cameron referendum was mainly devised to cope with division in the Tory Party, the Wilson referendum was mainly designed to cope with disunity in the Labour Party. The Tory opposition was almost wholly united in favour of staying in, not least its leader, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who was photographed wearing a fetching jumper embroidered with the flags of all the then Common Market members. Enoch Powell, the main Tory opponent of EU membership, had by then left his old party.

Business gave heavily to the ‘Yes’ campaign, which thus looked smooth and confident. The ‘No’ campaign, with its thin resources and often passionate but lonely advocates, looked amateur and defensive from the start.

Spending figures, and you must allow hugely for inflation here, were : ‘Yes’ campaign £1,850,000, ‘No’ campaign £133,000. But even without inflation, the *proportion* of ‘Yes’ money to ‘No’ money is astonishing. How could this be fair? Why wasn't there a ceiling? What is there to prevent it happening again? (I am indebted for these figures and other details to Christopher Booker and Richard North’s superb book ‘The Great Deception’ by a mile (1.609344 kilometres) the best account of the history of the EU and our relations with it.

The BBC’s role can be left to the imagination, though, as I wrote in the Mail on Sunday on 21st December 2008 :

‘WHAT a lot of fuss about Ed Stourton being dropped as a presenter of BBCRadio 4's Today programme. My sympathies to Mr Stourton, whose opinion of the BBC may now be closer to mine than it used to be, but I can't see any major significance in the substitution of one BBC standard-issue 'impartial' liberal for another.



'The non-row brings to mind the genuine scandal, still not properly explored, of the removal of the anti-Common Market presenter Jack de Manio from Today. A legendary BBC radio programme, called Document - A Letter To The Times, broadcast on February 3, 2000, records persuasively that the Corporation came under pressure from pro-Market lobbyists to sack Jack, and that he was soon after removed. Coincidence? You may believe that if you wish. I don't. The Labour peer Roy Hattersley creditably recalls his personal disgust when he attended a high-level pro-Market breakfast meeting at which similar actions against anti-Market broadcasters were openly demanded by pro-Brussels conspirators. I do hope the BBC repeats this amazing programme soon.’

They haven’t repeated it, and I never cease to be amazed that they transmitted it at all. I did hear it, long ago. A transcript of it can be accessed on the web, but only if you are prepared to pay.

Polls before the campaign showed a majority for departure. But the eventual result, on a 65% turnout was more or less two to one in favour of staying in – 67.2% to 32.8%.

I expect something very similar in Mr Cameron’s referendum. Indeed, if I were an EUphile, I would have for some time been an enthusiastic supporter of such a referendum. I can think of no more certain way of closing the issue forever. The route I would take, the steady accretion of power and support by a new political party committed to national independence, neither bigoted nor politically correct, free of the ghastly social and economic liberalism that all sensible people are rapidly coming to hate but which they now find everywhere in politics, I suppose there is an argument, once the thing has begun, for making the case for exit. But in such circumstances, what chance has my side? It has very few people in it who could be counted good TV performers or public speakers. Its arguments are often not very coherent. Its reliance on Thatcherite sentiment, and even its belief that a referendum was a goal worth chasing, demonstrates its ignorance of our own national history and of the forces at work.

Let me predict the course of events. The Tory Party leadership and its backers in business and elsewhere will, in the next few months, appear to merge themselves with ‘Eurosceptic’ opinion, reasonably accepting that British independence is practicable and may even be desirable, railing against EU ‘bureaucracy’ or some other vague characteristic.

Mr Cameron himself will strike increasingly nationalistic poses at gatherings of EU leaders, similar to his non-existent veto of December 2011 discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/dont-forget-they-cheered-chamberlains-victory-too.html

And here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/david-camerons-phoney-war-or-a-curse-in-disguise-.html

….or perhaps modelled on his bungled attempt to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker, another content-free episode of triangulation based on the belief (why do the Tory strategists think this?) that we are all almost unbelievably stupid. His logic appeared to run : ‘If I have a public row with this very foreign-seeming foreigner, UKIP voters (who, unlike me, the great and broad-minded David Cameron, really don’t like foreigners) will think I am just like them’ .

Then there will be negotiations at which we will be told the EU has abandoned some of its ‘red tape’ or diminished its demand for ever-closer union, or postponed some other power-grab. This will not be so, but when Mr Cameron, haggard and exhausted after night-long negotiations, emerges into the Brussels dawn to claim his triumph, the rest of the EU will keep quiet about the fact that there is no triumph, just as they kept quiet about the fact that he did not actually wield the veto in 2011. Winners don’t need to boast. They can let the losers vaunt themselves and brag, if it helps the real winners get their way.

And then all the Tories who have mingled for months with EU opponents , as if they were friends, will say ‘Mr Cameron, with charm and grit, has won a great and historic deal for Britain. Now we can in all conscience vote to stay in. So should you. Please join us’. This mingling is the real purpose of 'Euroscepticism', to gull and soothe genuine secessionists with what looks like friendship and agreement, the more powerfully to abandon and undermine them when the decisive moment arrives.

And precisely because they have feigned sympathy so well, and pretended to be in favour of leaving if the right conditions aren’t met, their defection will be all the more effective. And the nation will vote heavily to stay in, and the issue will be dead until the EU itself breaks up under its own strains, spitting us out into a pitiful loneliness we weren’t brave enough to choose when it might have been some use to us.

We have to get out of the EU through a Parliamentary majority, because that is the way we got in. Our entry into the then Common Market had been agreed by Parliament in 1972, quite properly under our constitution without a referendum, though otherwise dishonestly and immorally because those in favour did not admit the truth about what they proposed.

The paradox was that Parliament, acting as the sovereign body it then still was, extinguished its own sovereignty in a single division, in which the votes of Labour pro-marketeers saved Ted Heath from what would otherwise have been decisive defeat. This was yet another appearance of the cross-party liberal alliance, never tested openly at any general election (perhaps until now) which first transformed the country, and then became its permanent government. If you cannot defeat that alliance (now embracing the whole Tory Party) at the polls, you will never get anywhere.

Parliament ceased to be sovereign in this country the moment the European Communities Bill received Royal Assent. Its last truly sovereign act was to destroy itself , just as the Queen’s last truly sovereign act was to assent to her own abdication form her own sovereignty, and her eventual transformation into a mere citizen of the EU. Thus ‘England, which was wont to conquer others, hath now made shameful conquest of itself’. You really think a referendum will get us out of this?