The government is already getting the EU Referendum Bill wrong

The EU Referendum Bill has been accompanied by almost unprecedented flip-flopping and ‘reverse ferreting’. I think we have to accept that it is quite right for the Liberals and Labour to have changed their minds. Or at any rate, for the voters to have changed their minds for them. Speaking, as I do at Westminster, for the only party in parliament that has been consistent on this matter, I am very glad that the referendum is finally almost upon us. As Bill Cash said earlier today in the Commons, this is the culmination of a twenty-year fight that started with Maastricht, and involved betrayals and evasions by both main parties. It’s very good news that other parties, not least the Conservative, have caught up with the wisdom of the DUP on the need for a referendum, but unfortunately there’s still much work to be done on this particular bill.

Let’s leave to one side the merits or otherwise of British membership of the EU and consider instead the problems currently in the Bill – problems that will have to be ironed out in either the Commons or the Lords.