Time to Renegotiate: Why the Lib Dem ‘EU Membership Referendum’ could be a Tory Advantage

After six leading Liberal Democrats today put down an amendment to the Queen’s speech saying that they “humbly regret that the Gracious Speech fails to announce proposals for a referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union”, the leading Eurosceptic in the House of Commons, Tory MP, Bill Cash, has also put down a supporting amendment to the Liberal Democrat proposals that such a referendum, in receipt of a ‘No’ vote, “would properly lead to a new Intergovernmental Conference and the fundamental renegotiation of the existing treaties as they now stand.”

Read the parliamentary Order of Business for today:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmagenda/ob71114.htm
The amendments will be discussed later today in the Commons.

Bill Cash MP sought to amend the Lib Dem amendment (supported by Vince Cable MP) with a new amendment:

‘which despite a No vote arising from any such referendum would not necessitate automatic withdrawal from the European Union because such a No vote would then be on the Reform Treaty, devised and agreed in secrecy by the European elite, which undermines the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and its Parliament and its electorate and consists of all the now existing European Treaties and is, as the European Scrutiny Committee has reported, “substantially equivalent” to the original Constitutional Treaty on which a referendum was promised by the Government and any such No vote would properly lead to a new Intergovernmental Conference and the fundamental renegotiation of the existing treaties as they now stand.’