Adam Smith Institute

I see that 150,000 actually turned out to vote in the mini-referendum on the EU Constitution. (Sorry – minor amending treaty that's not really worth troubling people about.) And of those, over 133,000 voted that yes, they would actually quite like a proper referendum on the subject. For a private vote (in just ten of the UK's 650-odd election constituencies, and without any of the media frenzy and taxpayer-funded TV advertisements that we have in general elections), that's a pretty impressive turnout.

You can see all the details here.

More than that, they the voters indicated that if given the chance, they'd vote no. They were asked two questions:

Should the UK hold a national referendum on the EU's Treaty?
88% voted yes and 12% voted no. Less than 1% did not answer.

Should the UK approve the EU's Treaty?
89% voted against the Treaty and 8% voted in favour. 3% did not answer.

In eight of the ten seats a greater proportion of people voted for a referendum than voted for the sitting MP. ( On average the sitting MPs won 27.5% of the available vote. But of those balloted in this campaign, 31.2% voted for a national referendum.)

Still, the fact that when asked, the general public do come out and do vote against the Constitution (oops, there I go again) will not make a jot of difference in Westminster. Most MPs, with a few honourable exceptions, will stick with their party lines and deny the public their promised say. Mind you, thanks to iwantareferendum.com they might at least feel guilty about it.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed