The coalition’s inept EU referendum lock

At least this government is honest. ‘There will be,’ Europe Minister David Lidington says, ‘no referendum on the transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU during this Parliament’. The government will ensure that there are no more EU power transfer treaties; but, as Douglas Carswell, Tim Montgomerie, and Bill Cash all note, the Lisbon Treaty is self-ratifying. The EU has already picked the coalition’s lock and garnered new powers for itself – notably the extension of the EU arrest warrant.

The EU could be an economic superblock with the muscle to influence the globe strategically and culturally. But its current political operation is unnecessary and deplorably un-democratic. European nations’ commercial advantages are being squandered by needless regulation, petty squabbles and rare outbursts of antagonism. The continent’s democratic and liberal outlook is also being compromised by the union’s proposed expansion into Turkey, a country now more attuned to the east.

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