http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18663389

You bloody bet there is...

If the Tories turn round at the next election and said we could have a referendum if they won, I bet they'd win by a country mile.

I wonder. Because I genuinely wonder if anyone will believe them. After all, didn't they say that at the last election?

I see this as a distraction aimed at pandering to the rightwing backbenchers in an attempt to dig themselves out of the hole they're in.

The real story is the economy is tanking and they don't know what to do. Waffling about something that might possibly perhaps happen after the next election is just pointing in the other direction and shouting "squirrel!"

No idea, but even if they did I'm sure that would have been one of the things dropped to bring the Lib Dems on board.

Not so sure about that. There's a lot of the general population who would be up for pulling out of the EU...... exactly why politicians won't give people that vote, because they're scared people will have a different opinion to them.

I have a feeling you're right. However, if it happened this time it can happen next time too. Sad to say but, IMO, if you base your vote on what the parties put in their manifesto, you're a fool.

Europe never really features that highly on lists of voters' political priorities. If the Tories turned round and said "We want a referendum on the EU, but we also want to privatise the NHS", I imagine they'd lose by several country miles.

I'd like to have a fake referendum on Europe as I'm genuinely interested to know what the nation's feelings are about it. Polls never give the right answer and newspapers are so partisan as to be unrepresentative of popular opinion IMO.

As I was typing that, I realised that it would then show that what the public will was, so it ought to be binding. So let's have one, we do supposedly live in a democracy, after all!

I love democracy as long as everyone agrees with me and I imagine that's how everybody else feels including politicians.

God no, politicians hate democracy. It gets in the way of making a decent living. I'd imagine the civil service hate it even more.

Jon

All 450,000 of them?

That's the thing though: referendums and elections don't show the will of the people - merely the way they vote.

The two are not the same.

I didn’t think referenda were binding anyway.

A bit like pre-election pledges then.

People don't vote for stuff on the basis of facts or arguments, political debate is nearly always based on emotional appeals which cannot sensibly be reflected in policy because their purpose is not to explain an actual course of action, it is to persuade voters that a set of politicians share their view of the world.

For democracy to work properly it must be two sided - with politicians telling the truth to a populace who are interested in being told it. We aren't, they don't, and we consistently reward the biggest liars with the best jobs, so nobody comes out of it smelling too good if you really look at the process.

The euro debate is a case in point - on a grand scale. Both sides of the debate have been hijacked by utopian fantasists with simplistic mythologies to peddle. The EU is a mess because a series of German politicians have hoped against all evidence that they can inculcate their tardy neighbours with some kind of work ethic, but they have been consistently outmanoeuvred by Frenchmen and Italians clinging to a pathetic notion that everything can be kept exactly as it is forever if you close your eyes and wish real hard.

Our Eurosceptics think we're the only people who care about doing anything properly, they are prisoners of a delusion that we would unleash a mighty torrent of entrepreneurialism if only we would make it easier to sack people and harder to avoid deportation. And our Europhiles think much the same way as the Germans, except with an extra topping of fatalism that we are some kind of insignificant little island that must cling to the Euro skirt for protection (handily getting their excuses in early). European Anglosceptics think that if we bugger off that means they won't lose out, and Anglophiles (some of those euro guys are actually glad to have us around) think that our obstreperous tendencies can be curbed and we can actually become good neighbours.

All of those people are deluded. Especially the last set.