Verbatim report of speeches made by
members of the panel of representatives of campaigning organisations

at the SIXTH CONGRESS FOR DEMOCRACY

held in London on Friday 13 July 2001

 

Lord Beaumont of Whitley, Green Party, House of Lords

The Green Party will certainly be campaigning wholeheartedly for a No vote in the referendum if there is one - and I think they can’t get out of it now, though I wouldn’t put it past them to try.

The Green Party has things to offer the campaign as have the other representatives on this platform. In particular, we have just had a very successful general election, not by possibly the standards recognised by the press, but we did double our vote all over the country, we did save ten deposits whereas we had never saved one before and ten deposits is probably about enough to produce 10 seats in proportional representation given the necessary calculation you have to do to work out what it would be. We have one member of the Scottish Parliament, we have two members of the European Parliament and we have three members of the Greater London Authority and we share in administration of a number of local councils. So we do believe that we have something to offer in terms of our campaigning ability.

In addition, we will bring an enthusiasm which comes from a particular dislike of being taken over by multinational companies or things being ordered in the interests of multinational companies rather than the interests of democracy. We are a party, in a way, of the old fashioned left as we are a party which believes in movements towards more equality. We think that that can only be done when a nation has control of its own finances, which is what this campaign is going to be about. On the environmental measures, we think that the further down the electoral scale that power can be exercised the better and that things should be done as low down the scale as possible and only move upwards when they need to. We know the point will be made in the campaign that there are a number of things which environmentally are done better multinationally and we acknowledge that that is true. But we do not see why they cannot be done by organisations under the auspices of the Council of Europe, which is a much neglected body on which I had the great honour to serve as a Member of Parliament for a number of years, and the United Nations. In other words this is a rainbow coalition that we have in this campaign and we are proposing to do something rather unusual which is to add green to the rainbow. It may be slightly difficult but we will do it, we will go into it wholeheartedly and we wish to co-operate with all the rest of you in doing so.

 

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Lord Bell of Belgravia, Chairman, Conservative Keep the Pound Campaign

I am in the slightly awkward position in that although I am the Chairman of the Conservative Party’s Keep the Pound Campaign, I think I am only the Chairman since nobody has told me I am not, rather than anybody has told me I am, because there is not yet anybody who is in a position to tell me I am not. I also have not the faintest idea whether the Leader of our party will be against the single currency or in favour of it. On the assumption that it will be someone who is against the single currency and certainly from the perspective I see in the people who are members of the Keep the Pound Campaign, which is about 70% of the Conservative Party membership plus several hundred thousand others, I have no doubt that we will campaign to keep the pound and against the single currency and for a No vote in any referendum. So I am sure that, whoever is elected as Leader of the Party, that part of the party that I represent and look after will throw its full weight into any campaign that is designed to achieve a No vote in a referendum.

Given that background, I really only want to take a very small amount of your time and make four points about preparing for a referendum and for the referendum itself should it ever come.

The first is that I am absolutely convinced that we will get nowhere unless we have a united campaign. That is very simple to say, it’s much more difficult to do, but it does mean that all the different members of the organisations which are against the single currency should get together under one banner and all work in one campaign. Who will lead that I have not the faintest idea and that will be the most difficult part of the process, and the sooner we get on with meetings and discussions to try to arrive at that position the better. If Lord Beaumont is going to bring green to the rainbow then I will bring blue, which at least will give us two of the colours.

The second thing I am absolutely sure about is that we must run a No to the euro campaign not a No to Europe campaign. If we run a no to Europe campaign we will get divided by the other side, we will lose the argument in the media and will probably fail to deliver the kinds of levels of support that show up in research at the moment.

The third thing I am absolutely certain about is that the campaign must be primarily emotional. Whilst this is an extremely rational and economic debate that goes on at the moment and whilst there are many powerful rational and economic arguments for keeping the pound and not joining the single currency, I am convinced from all the research I have read that the vast majority of what you might call the soft support for the No vote is actually there for emotional reasons, not rational reasons. Perhaps the one piece of experience I could share with you was the referendum campaign in Chile when General Pinochet decided to retire. He held a referendum in which the question was "Would you like five more years of General Pinochet or anything else?" and "Anything else" won. "Anything else" was a No campaign, it was characterised as a Yes/No referendum: Yes meant voting for five more years of Pinochet and No meant voting for any other alternative and what was striking about the No campaign is that it was an entirely emotional campaign. Perhaps I can describe it in its simplest form as "Happiness is a No vote". I do think that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we want people to feel good about voting No, which is difficult to do because it is a negative thing to do. It is up to us to touch the emotions of people, to make them feel that voting No is a happy and positive emotional thing to do.

The fourth and last point I make is that in terms of getting this disparate group of people together it does seem to me that Business for Sterling and New Europe have taken a considerable lead in adopting the No as part of their campaign logo. If there is not anybody else who is prepared to be at the centre or who has as powerful a claim to it, I personally would think that it would be the role of Business for Sterling and the New Europe campaign to start the job of forming a co-ordinated campaign under their banner, but clearly bringing in all the other organisations so that they could participate in it.

I hope there will be a referendum and I hope that we will get a huge vote against the single currency and it would be wonderful if we could achieve the levels that show up in the research at the moment because 70% would leave absolutely nobody in any doubt about how the British people felt about it.

The only other thing I think that we have to think about in terms of the work preceding any given referendum is to try to set a view about what the question should be. I think if there was anything good that came out of the rather arid debate towards the end of the last election campaign, it was that the government does look as though it will have to ask a Yes/No question> I think the more pressure that we can put to ensure that that is the kind of question that is asked and that the voter will be simply asked to answer either Yes or No the more chance we have of winning a referendum and I wish us all luck.

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John Mills, Secretary, Labour Euro Safeguards Campaign

I have quite along pedigree in campaigning against the Common Market as it was, then the EEC and the EU. I was the person who dealt with the administrative arrangements during the 1975 referendum campaign when the result we had was not one which any of us can look back on with any great pleasure. So I have had quite a lot of experience on which to draw, but I think in particular of this recent experience particularly in Denmark and in Ireland which we need to focus on.

What I would like to spend a few moments on is talking about some of the lessons which I think can be learnt about those successful referendums from our point of view, rather than the one we had in 1975 when things went awry.

I think the first point I would like to make is that one of the strengths we have is our diversity. There are lots of people who have different views about whether we should stay in the EU, if we do on what terms we should do that. I think that the fact that many of our people are very passionate about these issues is a huge strength and I think to try and get everybody to agree on one single set of propositions is going to be very difficult. But if we are having a referendum about the euro, the big advantage of that is that there is one single issue on which we can all focus. I think what we need to be careful about doing there is to try and dragoon people to go any further than taking a Yes or No stance on that particular point. What we don’t want to do is to try and get everybody in behind other bandwagons related to other issues about whether or not we stay in the EU, and this I am sure is going to involve some flexibility over the way arrangements are made over platforms and so forth as we go ahead.

The second thing which relates to that is that I think we must be very careful that we discipline ourselves about who says what. The biggest danger that we have to face is that in the end we start looking extremist and unrealistic and unappetising and that we lose the middle ground. Never forget that in politics what counts is the votes. That doesn’t mean that you want to cast aside all your intellectual convictions and all your campaigning stances, but it does mean that you have to focus hard on getting the votes in and winning. We will not do that if we have people stepping out of line and making the sorts of statements which will turn a lot of people off.

The third point is that we need to be very professional in the way that we tackle all this. We need to make sure that we use all the techniques that are now available to ensure that we sift out the views of the electorate that are particularly significant in terms of making sure that we gather in as many people as we possibly can on our side. If we are doing that we also have to be very intelligent about the way that we do it. I must say one of the most impressive things about both the campaign in Denmark and the one in Ireland is how well organised they were, how intelligently they were run by the leaders who were responsible for delivering those successes. They really thought very hard indeed about the timing of advertising campaigns, what the message should be, how you could draw in as many people as possible on your side, how you could get a lot of people who normally were disenfranchised or did not bother voting to come in and take part in what was happening. If you look at the Denmark result, it was staggering how high the vote was and one of the reasons why they won was because they managed to get a whole lot of people to vote in that referendum who normally were not particularly interested in voting about anything. I think that this carefully orchestrated constructive approach is what we are going to need if we are going to win. Whether we want to campaign for having a referendum or not is quite a moot point. I think quite a lot of us take the view that we are better off never to have a referendum at all and to be so well-prepared that the government never takes the risk of having a referendum and losing it. But whether that is a realistic stance or not, whether we have a referendum or not, it must be the case that the better prepared we are, the better led we are, the more united we are, the better organised we are, the better chance we have of winning, and that’s what it’s all about.

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Doug Nicholls, Secretary, Trade Unions Against the Single Currency

I can’t resist the opportunity to mention Unilever, one of the companies that are very much in favour of the euro and perhaps they have revealed why. They are so concerned that we will be confused by the introduction of the euro next January that they have decided to raise all the prices of their products throughout Europe, which I think gives us an indication of how they treat us and how they see the advantages of the euro for some of the larger companies that support it.

The trade union movement is quite divided on this issue. It’s almost a civil war going on within the trade unions on the question of the single currency. The largest trade union, Unison, and the second largest, T & G, have very healthily sceptical positions. Unison in fact has a very strong position against the single currency and we are working very hard with all of the trade unions to try to raise the level of debate and bring them round to a sensible position. But make no mistake that that seven million constituency, whether you like it or you don’t like it, is quite a disciplined constituency and what goes on there will have a very significant impact on the voting position come a referendum. So we need to pay quite a bit of attention to it. The trade union movement is an important constituency within this so-called issue and in fact we are still wondering whether the rumour that there will be some attempt to use the trade union movement in September at the TUC Congress to launch a Vote Yes campaign is true or not. But there is still the prospect that that would be the case.

Unusually for a trade unionist, I have probably got only one point to make now, and see if you can find it. This Congress for Democracy has had very many eloquent speeches in the past, full of very eloquent rhetorical flourish and a profound understanding of the dangers of the single currency for our nation. In the speeches that have been made at this Congress we have recognised that the issue of sovereignty far outweighs any of our party allegiances or any of our political organisations. A patriotic campaign for national self-government has no place for cynical manipulators of personality or organisational self-interest and the measure of our conviction and our understanding of this issue will be seen in the extent to which those opposed to the single currency are able to focus our activity at the time of the referendum. That’s not just politically necessary, as previous speakers have said, but it is technically very necessary in relation to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act. This Act, as I understand it, gives the power to the Electoral Commissioner to designate an umbrella body which is truly representative of the broadest constituency of those opposed to the issue that might come up in a referendum. So it is absolutely vital, as previous speakers have said, that we perhaps develop our own sense of pooling sovereignty in a progressive way. We must put any of the stylistic or organisational differences aside and get ready, as John Mills has eloquently put it, to launch a very highly organised and professional campaign for a No vote, which of course is a positive thing for all the people of our country. I think the level of maturity will be seen in the extent to which the anti-euro campaigners can unite and focus their work to stop the single currency. If we are unable to unite and if there is competition for place to get the government funding, we will be seen by the British people as part of the treachery that is taking place.

Some may say that no referendum can actually sell a nation’s sovereignty and some may say that the real issue is in fact the question of our membership of the EU. However, in real political terms we are faced with the prospect of a referendum not to be timed at a moment of our choosing and not to be framed and formulated in the way that we would perhaps want it but nevertheless it will be there.

We have been used to working separately in our various campaigns against the euro. Larger businesses have had the very successful, largely press-related and research-based work of Business for Sterling, excellent work by the Federation of Small Businesses, and a range of other organisations. It has been horses for courses and we have been able to translate the overall argument into the different dialects and styles of our separate constituencies.

I think the referendum will challenge us to speak with one voice and probably with a new voice and no one organisation has the entire vocabulary and style to win unless we are joined together. The presentation of the issue in the general election perhaps was a case in point. We have to find a way of pooling our separate and different voices on this issue.

I think the absolute key to making progress is the collective and co-ordinated work that we have to do on this. Certainly it is not a campaign, in my view, that will be won or lost in the media alone. We will need the kind of grassroots campaigning expertise of Labour Euro Safeguards, Trade Unions against the Single Currency, the Green Party and many others, to ensure that the argument penetrates to every part of the nation.

I personally believe that the Agenda Committee that we have created through the Congress for Democracy is the best nucleus for that umbrella body and we should consider ways in which we could develop that to bring on board the full spectrum of those who will be campaigning on the issue.

I sense sometimes, particularly in recent weeks, a bit of complacency is setting in about the referendum. There is a sense that we have been very successful recently and reference has been made to the Chancellor’s statement and the Bank of England Chairman’s statement and so on. But I don’t think there is any room at all for that complacency. I think that the demand for entry into the single currency is absolutely central to the New Labour agenda and I think also that we have underestimated the extent to which preparations for the single currency are under way. We know the Treasury angle on that but also I suggest to you that what is happening to public services at the moment and above all what is happening to the restructuring and decline of indigenous national-based manufacturing industry, the move to regional government, the development of even more quangos and the introduction of the euro as a salary for many workers in manufacturing industry are all part of the drip- drip towards the single currency coming in. So we should take on some of those issues as well.

I think we have under-estimated too the successes we have had in the Congress in some of the regional meetings that we have held. We have had quite broad-based platforms in the north-east, in the south midlands and so on. Some of the work that we will have to do at the time of the referendum to bring ourselves together has been reflected in the regional meetings that we have been holding and a wide diversity of us who united on this issue have worked well together. I think perhaps in the coming months we need to see more of that practical work so that we are used to working together more effectively and efficiently.

So it is a time I think now that it is getting very serious indeed that there is some practical organisational application and there is widespread recognition amongst all of us that a broad-based umbrella group representing all the constituencies but focusing absolutely pointedly on this central issue for our generation is constructed. So I hope that we can get on with that work from this afternoon’s Agenda Committee meeting.

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Brian Prime, International Ambassador and Chairman International Affairs Policy Unit, Federation of Small Businesses

The European economic and monetary union, with its single currency the euro, is the most divisive issue we could wish to engage in. There is no representative group, political party, business organisation or trade union that does not have a split in its membership. The FSB is no exception. However, the vast majority of our members at the last survey showed that 86% are opposed to abolishing the pound sterling in favour of the euro.

Most people are probably under the impression that small business people are small minded and will only look at the costs involved and the administrative problems involved in the changing of our currency. Not so. Our opposition includes the constitutional issues and we believe changing the pound sterling for the euro will be a major step to the demise of the United Kingdom we an independent nation.

The general public is not being informed or reminded of all the factors involved in joining the single currency. It’s not just changing the coins in one’s pocket. And the referendum campaign needs to cover all other areas such as the surrender of our gold reserves, transfer of control of our foreign currency, the loss of economic control of our economy and also that the single currency opens the door to many other issues such as tax harmonisation. How long before political union, which after all is the main objective?

These are the all important issues; we are the incumbent caretakers of our nation’s sovereignty and independence. We don’t believe we have the right to rob future generations of their inheritance and freedom that we have enjoyed. The referendum on joining the EMU single currency will be the most important decision the British people will have been called upon to make in their lifetime.

For all these reasons a UK referendum must be transparent, honest and address all the issues involved. Public funds must be balanced. The publicly funded media should observe this balance by reporting facts of news form both sides but not promote their own bias. We must endeavour to achieve a referendum that all will accept and respect from both sides of the argument. We propose that the Electoral Commission, the independence monitoring body, should have the authority and teeth to deal with abuse of the basic principles. They need to have the authority to cancel the referendum and to set a new date should they feel an abuse of the honesty principle would mislead the public. It will not be good enough to have an inquest after the event, failure to deal with the issue sat the time will provide a future of grievance and bitterness which benefits no one.

I believe we will soon be seeing some of this grievance within the 12 member nations in October, November, December and January as they face the final run up and abandonment of their national currency to take on the euro, which ahs been forced upon them by their politicians and bureaucrats, as it becomes more apparent just what their governments have committed them to.

Mr Chairman, democracy is merely a word used by europhiles but only recognised when things go their way. The arrogance of the unelected European elite is exposed in their attitude to the Danish and Irish people who had the audacity and freedom to vote No.

We are threatened or warned that if we vote No we will become isolated. Just imagine the United Kingdom being isolated with 96% of the rest of the world that lies outside the borders of the European Union.

The FSB is not anti-European; our members are not little Englanders, just hard working people who value the identify of our nation and care who controls our money supply.

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Lord Stoddart of Swindon, Chairman, Campaign for an Independent Britain

I am here as the Chairman of the Campaign for an Independent Britain, an organisation which believes we should never have gone into the European venture and still believes that we should come out tomorrow, if not sooner.

I suppose once you are sixth speaker there is nothing left to say on a single subject, but I’m going to say it nevertheless. The first thing I want to say is that the CIB does understand that the sacrifice of our currency is of prime importance and we should combine with all other organisations to see that it does not happen.

Before I go on I did want to quote from a little snippet from the Daily Telegraph yesterday, and it reads like this: "Belgium warned Austria yesterday against holding a referendum on the expansion of the European Union in case it lost." Louis Michel, the Foreign Minister of Belgium no less, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said: "I personally think it is very dangerous to organise referendums when you are not sure you are going to win." I have no doubt that Mr Blair might take that to heart.

In this campaign there is going to be the need for the whole of the euro realist movement to be involved in the referendum campaign. It is not the monopoly of any one group and let us keep that in mind in the months and years ahead. And furthermore, the arguments cannot be confined to economic and financial issues. The issue of sovereignty – that is, who governs Britain – cannot be ignored and is likely to be viewed as more important than economic aspects by the electorate. I would remind you that it was on the grounds of democracy and self-government that the Danish people rejected the euro and that was the issue – democracy and freedom. I believe that also played no small part in the rejection of the Nice Treaty by the people of the Irish Republic.

People are not so daft as the elite think they are. These referendums were not won by a small elite, they were won by a number of organisations, not all that well financed, working together at people level and informing the electorate of the long term consequences and persuading them that their hard-won freedoms, democracy and self-government were at great risk. As the Danish and Irish referendums showed, it is the ordinary voter who will be king on referendum day.

We must be sure, therefore, that we have a strong organisation at constituency level to canvass, to inform, to persuade, to deliver written material on an organised basis and to build a system of identifying our supporters and getting them out to vote on the day and of course that includes the postal vote. We must not forget, we will do so at our peril, that we shall be up against the official electoral organisation and publicity machine of the Labour Party aided by that of the Liberal Party and abetted by the Tory europhiles who have access to both money and organisational assistance. That is what we are going to be up against.

So our campaign will need financing and those organisations who are working at people level must not be starved of funds because the available sources of finance are being cornered and monopolised by any one single organisation. We will need to have discussions at a fairly early date about this because I do not believe that the government have had a change of heart about the euro. Blair is committed to the project and will go for a referendum when he feels – and he will listen to the Belgian Foreign Minister – it is politically expedient to do so. We must not be lulled into a sense of false security and think that time is on our side, so we must keep our organisations busy and build them into a winning team whenever the time comes.

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Russell Walters, Director, Democracy Movement

Most comment about the referendum campaign from our side centres on structure or strategy, issues such as who is going to be on the top table, who is going to sit in on the ad agency pictures, what is the campaign’s stance on the EU as a whole going to be, should we fight it on the economy or the constitution or so on. These are all undoubtedly important if not vital issues, but today I want to highlight a dimension of the struggle which Lord Stoddart touched on and which we in the Democracy Movement feel has not yet received the attention it deserves.

The Democracy Movement is a grass roots organisation and we tend to look at things from ground level and everything seems a little more prosaic from that perspective. The issue we want to project further into our debate is how are we going to fight the referendum campaign on the ground.

There is a lot of talk about the media war over the airwaves, but what about the ground war? It is unrealistic to assume or to hope that the campaign should be entirely a media war. The fact is that enthusiasts on all sides will be taking to the streets of their own volition if there is no overall architecture of which they can be a part. This carries with it the prospect of groups canvassing the streets being distinctly off-message as regards the national campaign and being used in the media to embarrass or compromise the national message.

But apart from cohesion there are other benefits of contesting the ground war. No-one who has ever fought elections can doubt the advantage of identifying your likely voters months in advance, monitoring how many of them will vote on polling day and knocking up those who have not voted before it is too late. Both turnout and party organisation are traditionally lax for referendums in this country. But as Lord Stoddart has said, we will be up against the Labour Party electoral machine and that can only be a fearsome prospect. If the Labour machine performs even at half strength on referendum day, then the outcome could well hinge on matching it. If the Labour machine performs indifferently then a well-fought ground war could mean the difference between just beating the euro and another referendum in a few years or kicking it into touch for good.

It would be madness to let the ground war go by default. We believe our side needs its own joint electoral organisation into which every group that wants to help, from Conservative Associations to Unison branches can be fitted. Everyone who is not manning the press office on referendum day should be number-snatching at polling stations or knocking up. We cannot all be chiefs in this campaign but every indian has a vital contribution to make. The Democracy Movement believes this organisation, which we call "ground force" would look at every single constituency to allocate responsibility for every single polling station. Clearly the Conservative Party machine will be essential in this, but equally clearly it will not be up to the job by itself. We would envisage that in a single constituency the local Conservatives will run some polling stations, others will be in the charge of the Democracy Movement branch, the UKIP, the Campaign for an Independent Britain, SANITY, the Greens, the Freedom Association, the Socialist Labour Party, or any group that wants to come to together to help – local trade union branches for example. None will be working under the supervision of the other, but all slotting separately into the great scheme agreed in advance. No group would be merged with others it might find uncongenial, each would have its own responsibility, just as in the pals’ battalions of the Great War those who sign up together should serve together.

An electoral campaign this sophisticated cannot be thrown together overnight. You can’t snatch numbers, you can’t knock up, unless you have electors pledged to support you and that means organising canvassing, beginning six months to a year in advance. The Democracy Movement has a supporter list of almost a quarter of a million people. The Tories, we are told, have 300,000 members. We are also told that almost twice that number of people signed their Keep the Pound petition. The Greens have a membership list, as does every other group represented in this room. This is all data-protected information, yet believe a legal way must be found to negotiate for all this information to be pooled in secure circumstances and split up into constituency chunks to provide the foundation for constituency financing efforts. This also cannot take place overnight.

Nor can we create overnight the trust that all sides would need to have in the central bureau of the ground force in order for them to part with this data in the first place. That too has to grow with time. Who will actually print out the canvassing returns for knocking up on referendum day? Will it be done locally or nationally? Whose computer will be used? Whose printer? Whose specialist software? What continuous stationery and how will it be paid for? This too must be known and agreed in advance.

So it is obvious that if we are to have a ground force to fight this referendum there will be a long lead time before it becomes effective. If we are to do it we will need to resolve these issues sooner rather than later and the Democracy Movement feels we have to do it because it will make a crucial contribution to our victory and is the only practical way in which most people in this room will be able to contribute on the day. A media war between two offices in London involves very few people and just a few mistakes by even fewer of those people could decide the future of our country. I am not sure I trust anyone quite that much.

The Democracy Movement wants this campaign to be a people’s war with tens of thousands of people across the nation sharing this enormous burden and contributing to our ultimate victory.

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