Cable's response to the PM's statement on the Lisbon Intergovernmental Conference

1.47.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Tue 23rd Oct 2007

I welcome the statement. We believe that the treaty is necessary. It is in the British national interest that the European Union should work efficiently and effectively, but there remains the issue of legitimacy. We believe that there should be a referendum. The public should decide whether Britain should remain a committed member of the European Union. A great deal has changed since the Harold Wilson referendum in 1975. There has been a pooling of sovereignty through Mrs. Thatcher's Single European Act, John Major's Maastricht treaty, Tony Blair's Amsterdam and Nice treaties, and now this treaty. The time has come for consultation with the British public on the cumulative effect of those treaties, because there is anxiety about national sovereignty, and that has to be addressed through public debate.

We cannot continue with the approach perfected by the Conservative party, which, when in office, supported European integration without referendums, but which, when in opposition, supports the worst features of anti-European populism. May I take the Prime Minister back to his early political career in Scotland? He will remember that a movement was launched by great figures such as the late John Smith and Donald Dewar, and by lesser figures such as the Prime Minister and me, to persuade the then sceptical Labour movement of the merits of the European Union. We won that argument, and we ask him to return to it, because very few people under the age of 50, including the Foreign Secretary, have been able to engage in the debate. If the Prime Minister does return to that argument, it will help him to escape from the image that he created of someone who is afraid of the ballot box. He may also persuade the leader of the Conservative party to say whether he is in favour of Britain being in or out of the European Union, or both at the same time.

I now turn to the specifics of the treaty. The red lines were of course understandable, but on the vision, as the Prime Minister describes it, what is he doing to promote a more decentralised and devolved Europe, rather than the European superstate that is the figment of Europhobes' imagination? Why did he not do more to promote the concept of subsidiarity, which is so weak in the treaty? Does he not realise that it is highly corrosive to public confidence when the European Commission promotes issues such as rules on working time, which should be a matter of national competence, instead of using its energy to deal with cross-border issues such as global warming and the aviation industry's contribution to it?

We support the Prime Minister's vision of an open, outward-looking Europe, but why has he not rebuked his friend and former colleague, Peter Mandelson, who, instead of getting down to his job of delivering liberalised world trade negotiations, is launching protectionist attacks on China? What is the Prime Minister doing to address the urgent deteriorating political situation in Turkey, partly created by rebuffs from the European Union? Will he at last give us a timeline for fundamental reforms of the wasteful, economically illiterate common agricultural policy?

My final question to the Prime Minister is this: will he come out of his bunker and join the Liberal Democrats in supporting a referendum on British membership of the European Union, and join us in making the European case, and campaigning for a yes vote?