The Tories will save us. Or not.

There must be an election coming soon or something because William Hague has been wheeled out for yet another lengthy puff piece. Once again he is making vague promises that a future Tory government would do blah blah blah:

He promised immediate legislation for a referendum to reject the treaty if it had not been ratified by the whole of the EU by the time that the Conservatives took power.

He left open the door to the possibility of the Tories promising a referendum in their election manifesto even if the treaty had been ratified by then.

Well, that's me convinced. We might as well pack up and go home; William Hague will nip into government, fix the EU and be back in time for tea and medals.

There are one or two niggling doubts about the Tory promises that are barely worth mentioning however. Firstly, as Hague admits, there is only a 50-50 chance that the Constitution/Lisbon Treaty won't have been ratified by the time the Tories get into government; at which point they can't legally do anything. The chances of the treaty being ratified will be significantly less if Libertas can produce a good result in the June elections, and we can send a strong message from right across Europe that the Constitution is not what the people want.

Secondly, one doesn't hold a referendum to 'reject' a treaty. This fundamental misunderstanding of a basic principle of democracy is deeply worrying. A referendum is held to find out what the public want. If the Tories thought that they could lose such a referendum, would they still be (vaguely) promising it? 

More importantly, the Lisbon Treaty is just the tip of the iceberg. The EU is in a disastrous anti-democratic mess and there's zero evidence that the Conservatives have even considered a plan for fixing it. They seem happy with the EU as it is and never mutter a word about reform. 

The final point about all of this is that the Tories are transparently trying to link a referendum in Britain with voting for the Conservatives in the EU elections... although the two issues are completely separate. No amount of Tory MEPs are going to make any difference to whether we get a referendum in Britain. They haven't made a difference for the last ten years, and they won't make any difference for the next five either.

If you want something to change, then you need to change your vote.