Cameron and indeed all the parliamentary parties are running scared about a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. They all want to dodge the issue as long as they can. Capitalists love the EU, and why not – its free movement of labour and goods weakens the working class and pours profits into their pockets. They would trample Britain into the dust to protect those profits.
Cameron says that if he won the next election he would renegotiate our terms of membership, and only then would he let us have our say. So a referendum would depend on two unlikely conditions: a Conservative election win, and a renegotiation that could mean anything. And even then we’d have no referendum until 2017 at the earliest. Cameron offers not a pledge, just a delaying tactic.
Any referendum from Labour, the “party of Europe”, would be about staying in the EU, but on new terms. Whatever the government said it wanted, the EU would just say no. We’d still be stuck in the European Union.
We must have a clear yes/no referendum: Britain’s future depends on leaving the EU. Workers must force the issue. ■