Why is Ed Miliband coming out against an EU referendum?
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2014, 14:42
Visible to anyone in the world
Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, has just announced that there will be no referendum on Britain's EU membership if Labour win the 2015 election.
On the face of it, this seems surprising. I'm not aware of any good opinion poll data to back this up, but my impression is that while many voters probably don't care very much about EU membership, of those who have strong opinions on whether we should have a referendum, most think that we should have one.
This policy would therefore appear to have a risk of losing votes, and little prospect of gaining any. This is odd.
One possible explanation is that Miliband genuinely believes that it would be wrong to have a referendum and is acting on principle. I think we can rule that one out pretty quickly. Miliband is a career politician, and wouldn't know a principle if it came up and slapped him in the face with a wet fish. No, surely the real reason must be more calculating than that.
Another possibility is that I'm wrong about voters' opinions of a referendum. That is certainly a possibility: as I said, I'm not aware of any hard data to back up my hunch. However, I really would be very surprised if there were significant numbers of voters out there who strongly believed that it would be wrong to have a referendum on EU membership.
So here's my theory about why Miliband made the announcement he did. On the whole, the business community don't like the idea of a referendum. It creates uncertainty, which is always bad for business. My guess is that Miliband is thinking mainly about Labour Party finances. While I haven't been keeping up hugely with how they're doing, I'm pretty sure they're not in a good state, and the recent change to the rules about getting income from trade union membership will certainly not help.
By coming up with policies that will be welcomed by the business community, I suspect Miliband calculates that it will make his life easier when he is asking big businesses for donations to party funds.
Why is Ed Miliband coming out against an EU referendum?
Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, has just announced that there will be no referendum on Britain's EU membership if Labour win the 2015 election.
On the face of it, this seems surprising. I'm not aware of any good opinion poll data to back this up, but my impression is that while many voters probably don't care very much about EU membership, of those who have strong opinions on whether we should have a referendum, most think that we should have one.
This policy would therefore appear to have a risk of losing votes, and little prospect of gaining any. This is odd.
One possible explanation is that Miliband genuinely believes that it would be wrong to have a referendum and is acting on principle. I think we can rule that one out pretty quickly. Miliband is a career politician, and wouldn't know a principle if it came up and slapped him in the face with a wet fish. No, surely the real reason must be more calculating than that.
Another possibility is that I'm wrong about voters' opinions of a referendum. That is certainly a possibility: as I said, I'm not aware of any hard data to back up my hunch. However, I really would be very surprised if there were significant numbers of voters out there who strongly believed that it would be wrong to have a referendum on EU membership.
So here's my theory about why Miliband made the announcement he did. On the whole, the business community don't like the idea of a referendum. It creates uncertainty, which is always bad for business. My guess is that Miliband is thinking mainly about Labour Party finances. While I haven't been keeping up hugely with how they're doing, I'm pretty sure they're not in a good state, and the recent change to the rules about getting income from trade union membership will certainly not help.
By coming up with policies that will be welcomed by the business community, I suspect Miliband calculates that it will make his life easier when he is asking big businesses for donations to party funds.