How does he get out of the vote conundrum? Just got back home after out two and half weeks in Andalusia and am trying to catch up with what’s been happening. The thing I don’t understand about the Commons EU referendum vote issue is how Cameron & Co got into this position in the first place. Surely they should have seen this coming a mile off and tried to take some deflective action? Whatever the vote is taking place and…
(… and if it did – would one be held?…) Take part in the PB poll Will MPs vote in favour of holding a referendum on EU membership? YES they will NO they won’t Mike Smithson is back from AndalucÃa tomorrow.
After the Slovak “No”, Mark Gill looks at polling on Europe There are many reasons explaining why European nations have different views on whether their country benefits from EU membership. History, political culture, geography and media all play an important part. Yet, the extent to which a nation is a net contributor of EU funds does not seem to have that much influence. True, the UK is one of the largest net contributors to EU coffers (even taking account of…
Do Brits generally vote for the status quo? The wonderful Archbishop Cramner blog has an insightful post in which he poses the question of whether the much sought after referendum on leaving the EU could end up with the same outcome as on AV last May. He argues: “..The pro-AV campaign was disunited, poorly articulated, badly led, painfully patronised and hopelessly disorganised. Against all that, its generous and credible funding went absolutely nowhere. Similarly, on the matter of an EU…
Or is he being constrained by Nick & the Lib Dems? Several observers are reporting that there’s increasing concern amongst Tory MPs about Dave’s position on Europe. His detractors want a more eurosceptic approach which is very different from what they are hearing from their leader. Daniel Knowles in the Telegraph reports on the feelings of many Tory backbenchers: “… For many, Europe has taken on significance as a test of the power of Parliament. Though they bang the desks…
BBC news How serious is the debt crisis going to get? It is a measure of how preoccupied the media has been with the phone-hacking scandal and the associated stories of the aborted NewsCorp takeover of BSkyB that prior to Thursday, one or other aspect of it formed the subject of Robert Peston’s previous sixteen blog entries. It is without doubt a major and developing story and fascinating to the Westminster Village as it involves so many of them. But…
What’ll be the impact of events in Athens? One of the findings in the monthly MORI issues index that invariably attracts controversey is on the EU/Europe. This month there was a zero score for those making it the main issue and just 3% listed it as one of the “other issues”. How can it be, it is asked, that so few people seem to care? That’s hard to answer but even in the survey that coincided with the June 2009…
Guardian Could the blues be vulnerable on the bail-out costs? Patrick Wintour in the Guardian has an interesting piece about a Labour plan to “to work with Eurosceptic Tories to reduce the size of UK contributions to the bailout of troubled eurozone nations and to cut the timescale of UK liability.” He writes: “Labour is weighing up an alliance with increasingly fractious Tory Eurosceptics over two specific issues likely to return to the Commons in the next few months –…