Monday, January 21, 2008

Pick A Promise , Any Promise ...


The Lib Dems who promised to vote for a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty in the last General Election, are reneging . They claim they now want an In-Out referendum instead, but cannot table one in the Commons as an amendment to the present Bill. ( of course they knew this would be the case). This is a piece of sleight of hand , they simply know that as Eurofederalists in a Eurosceptic country they are in difficulties .
In my own area a plan for a new Incinerator has lifted the rock because the UKIP PPC wrote a letter revealing that months arguments to and from were entirely pointless the EU s stipulations on Landfill meant we had no choice. Norman Baker replied claiming that there were other options which has subsequently been dismissed by the local UKIP PPC. For Baker the problem is he cannot now represents himself as a localist and a democrat when it is all too clear he supports a Party who believe this decision should be substantially taken by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels . The details of the row are not important in a sense ;the whole subject is toxic for him as the supposed voice of local dissent
Clog should order his MPs to vote for the Constitutional Treaty referendum. The Lib Dems matter, as it is very unlikely the Conservatives can win the vote for the referendum without them. The behaviour of the Lib Dems over this bodes nothing but ill should they hold the balance of power after the next election. They cannot be trusted and in the end they will support Brown just as they have done here . In fact ,s
ure enough , in today`s Independent we see the first signs of the nascent Brown Clegg pact - Lib Dems may be offered PR as part of power-sharing deal( see note 3).
NOTES
Note 1
(PS This sort of cobbled together from Redwood`s post bits of me and Letters from a Tory but it is , in total what I wanted to say)
Note 2
(Labour rebels are moving a reasoned amendment to the Bill, asking to cancel it as there is no referendum. This is not the main vote on a referendum – that will come later during the Bill’s Parliamentary progress – when Conservatives will table a proposal to have the Bill enacting the Treaty with a “Yes” vote in a referendum as the essential trigger for the Bill to come into effect).

7 comments:

Old BE said...

N, parts of your post are eerily similar to John Redwood's post!

Newmania said...

It is ( quickly) adapted , I should have akcknowledged which I will

Old BE said...

I thought Mr Redwood might have copied it from you...

Newmania said...

Ha ha ha ... no it just happened he was saying exactly what I wanted to say and I fell between just reprinting and doing a precis and changing it a bit . In fact I was going to do this when I heard Farrage on the radio saying the same thing this morning.

Old BE said...

I caught a bit of that - he sounded very sensible.

Anonymous said...

Moving the subject on somewhat, but it is just abundantly clear that the LibDems have neither the skills nor the confidence to run local councils (as exemplified when they had control in E Sussex and now running Lewes District Council) let alone running the country.

Norman Baker MP and his party secretly look at the option of getting into bed with NuLab for one reason only because they are petrified of power and desperate to have decisions made for them.

If it comes to the crunch and there is a hung parliament after the next General Election it will be the likes of Baker who will allow Gordon Brown (and NuLab) to remain on office.

Surely the sensible electorate of Lewes must realise that the only avenue for change is to vote Conservative.

Newmania said...

Anon, I `m not sure, Baker is pretty effective and most people here think only locally

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