12/06/2015
The prospect of a defeat on a flagship Bill for a newly elected government is usually considered news. Thus, when the
Independent ran the story yesterday, on how Labour was preparing "to join with Tory Eurosceptic MPs to inflict an embarrassing defeat on the Government over its EU Referendum Bill", I expected to see this spread across the Fourth Estate.
Apart from a down-page reference in the
Guardian, though, there seems scarcely to have been a reference to this imminent defeat, arising from Wednesday's PMQs.
It was then that
Harriet Harman, Labour's acting leader, tasked Mr Cameron on the issue of who could vote in the Referendum. "Why will the Prime Minister not let 16 and 17-year-olds vote?" she asked. "This is about the future of our country. They did in the Scottish referendum. It is their future too".
Mr Cameron's preference to stick with the current franchise at 18 was then met with a further query on why the Government was changing the law to exempt it from the rules preventing it from inappropriately using public funds or the government machine in the short campaign. "Will he think again on this?" Harman asked.
Volunteering the term "purdah" without bidding, Cameron countered that, because the European issue is so pervasive, "I do not want a situation where, in the four weeks before a referendum, Ministers cannot talk about the European budget, make statements about European Court judgements, respond to European Councils and all the rest of it. That seems a very real danger, as the Europe Minister set out last night".
However, that was not the end of it â there was a "second issue". This, Mr Cameron added: "is a bigger one":
When the negotiation is complete and the Government have taken a clear view, I do not want us to be neutral on this issue; I want us to speak clearly and frankly. In the last few weeks before the Scottish referendum, the UK Government were often being advised that they could not take a view on the future of the UK. I think that was a ridiculous situation, which is why we have proposed changes to the purdah rules.
And with that, the prime minister sought to justify sweeping away the very core principle of "neutrality" espoused by the
Neill Committee, not that this dawned on Harriet Harman. "The problem is that it is not a change in the rules, but a blanket exemption. We must have a legal framework in the Bill. We cannot rely on ministerial restraint", she said.
That indeed is the case, but Harman had finished with that point, and moved on to ask whether the Prime Minister would guarantee a separate voting day for the referendum. And here the response was
very interesting.
Mr Cameron's view was that "the timing of the referendum should be determined by the timing of the renegotiation - when the renegotiation is complete, we set a date for the referendum. I do not think it should be determined by the timing of other elections". For emphasis, he repeated: "the timing of the referendum should be determined by the timing of the renegotiation; that is the clear principle".
This is the very first time we have heard such a principle enunciated â and it does not compute. If we go by the Electoral Commission rules, the administrative process of setting up the referendum can't start until the date has been named. And if that is what is going to happen, that adds nine months onto the end of negotiation process, before the poll can take place.
If we posit a date in October 2017 and work back from there, Mr Cameron's "negotiations" have to be concluded in January of that year â missing the opportunity of using the UK presidency for grandstanding. And that simply does not seem likely.
Nor indeed does it seem likely that Mr Cameron would want to conclude his negotiations and then allow us nine months to unpick the results. His whole strategy would unravel. And nor even, with
current developments does it seem he can (or wants to) finish his little soap opera early.
As it stands, therefore, we're not getting the whole picture, or anything like it. But then, it may be that Mr Cameron isn't in control. And if the Commons does gang up on him in committee next week, there is a defeat in the making. Then, whatever strategy the Prime Minister had in mind will be in tatters.
