Eurosceptic newspapers are too competitive to work together on a referendum

Polly Toynbee of the Guardian believes that the Daily Mail is responsible for most of what is wrong with this country. When she learnt that the paper was intending to hold its own referendum on the new European constitution, the streets of Clapham, where Polly has her house, began to tremble. ‘Who runs the country?’ she demanded to know in her column of 21 May. The answer was that the ‘right-wing press barons’ with their ‘raucous bullying’ want to. The Daily Mail was naturally the worst offender. Its decision to have its own plebiscite was ‘a crude usurpation’. Polly seemed to think that the paper was asking the citizens of Britain to make a judgment about ‘an as yet unformulated EU constitution’, though in fact it was merely asking them to vote on whether or not they wanted a proper referendum.

Despite Polly’s fears, there is as yet no evidence that the Daily Mail is running the country.