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.

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