Ipsos-MORI October 2009 Issues table Is the evidence that voters don’t give a monkey’s I’ve raised this before and will raise it again – the EU and other issues relating to Europe are not things that get voters wound up. The polling suggests that this is very low down on the list of concerns. Above is the MORI issues index for October – a month that saw several days of the Lisbon treaty being the main political news when the…
Could this solve Cameron’s Lisbon ratification difficulties? Tim Montgomerie at ConservativeHome has an important post tonight setting out what he believes will be Cameron’s new approach to the EU issue following the likely ratification within the next few days of the Lisbon Treaty. In broad terms the plan is to substitute the holding of a referendum (which always looked difficult once ratification happened) with putting the fight for repatriation of key EU powers in the Tory general election manifesto –…
 David Herdson assesses some of the options? Nearly eight years after the Laeken Summit kickstarted the process, there’s a good chance that the final hurdles to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty could be overcome next week, leading to the treaty coming into force on December 1. In Britain, that will throw the spotlight onto the Tories, whose policy on Lisbon will expire with the completion of the ratification process. The current policy of a referendum is one which is…
Could he open up some of the old wounds? I wonder whether all the focus on the prospect of “President Blair” and the continued attacks by Labour on the Tory EU partners is actually overshadowing what could be the biggest UK-EU political development of them all – the rhetoric which is coming from David Cameron? This was looked at by the BBC’s Nick Robinson who today has also written a piece about it. Robinson writes: “..The new Conservative approach to…
Will Hague’s opposition thwart Tone’s EU hopes? With just one country left to ratify the Lisbon treaty we are getting closer to the moment when the EU will be appointing the first President of the EU council who is likely to become referred to as the President of Europe. The big question, and there’ quite a bit of betting on this, is who is going to get it? Can Tony Blair, Labour’s star three-times election winner who was ousted to…
Is this worth a punt? Ladbrokes has put a couple of interesting referendum markets up this morning one of which offers some value. This is the 10/1 shot that there will be a referendum on the Lisbon treat during 2010. The price looks quite tempting. Clearly it requires the Tories to win the election and then to go forward with a referendum plan that happens before the end of next year. As of now the party is only committed to…