Brexit and Ed Miliband

Some thought that Ed Miliband might use his conference this year to announce a commitment to an EU referendum and some powerful voices in Ed Miliband’s ear helped to make sure that didn’t happen.

This weekend, Adam Afriyie’s push for an earlier referendum reminded people of divisions within the Labour Party on this as Tom Watson, Ed Miliband’s former campaign manager and Shadow Cabinet member, backed the move.

(By the way, a well-coordinated round robin letter from Tory MPs has just thumped onto Adam Afriyie’s desk and might mark the end of his “early referendum” amendment.)

So, the internal debate within Labour continues on this one, and in Whitehall and Brussels you find people who worry that the greatest chance of British exit from the EU could come with a Labour or Lab-Lib government.

The theory goes like this. Ed Miliband will not be able to resist the pressure (particularly now Nick Clegg is tip-toeing back to an in/out referendum commitment) and at some point will succumb and offer an in/out referendum in his 2015 manifesto.

The Brussels/Whitehall old hands I’ve spoken to think this could be particularly perilous if you think Brexit would be a big mistake. They can envisage David Cameron managing to keep the UK “in” if a renegotiation produced some saleable goods  and the numbers of Tory MPs who support the “out” campaign were to be kept below around 50.

But if Labour is elected, the argument runs, with a last minute promise of a referendum you could have an in/out vote with no central strategy for winning it, no improved terms of membership and a different balance of powers lined up in the referendum.

That last point arises because they imagine the Tories could easily be in the “out” camp if David Cameron lost the next election.

He, for sure, would not be the party leader after such a defeat and whether it was a newly parachuted-in Boris Johnson or someone else, there must be a chance that the leader of a defeated Tory party, in part defeated by its inability to win back UKIP voters, would be sorely tempted to lead the party into the “out” camp. It could be his/her best hope of keeping a disconsolate Tory party together.

So you could have the Tories aligned with disaffected Labourites, UKIP and a few others lined up against Labour and the Lib Dems at a time when the government was trying to tackle the remaining £26bn of austerity measures already pencilled in for the next Parliament.

Labour, of course, hasn’t announced a referendum commitment and might never do so.

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