Dismal EU debate is a damp squib

Finally, this week, the Tories got to debate an EU referendum bill.

Unable to table legislation for a poll in Government time due to Lib Dem opposition they hi-jacked a Friday sitting usually set aside for backbench business.

Stockton MP James Wharton’s motion is a private members bill only in name.

Earlier in the year he went on record saying the Tories needed to talk less about Europe. In doing so he echoed his leader’s comments from back in 2006 when David Cameron told his party to stop “banging on about Europe”.

Yet on Friday, the two men went through the voting lobbies together Wharton as the proposer of a bill drafted in Number 10 at the end of a day in which the Commons had discussed little but Europe.

There was one other item on the agenda Peter Bone’s bill to rename the August bank holiday Margaret Thatcher Day.

In the event the headbanger-in-chief of the Tory Taliban got just two minutes to promote his bill before the session ended.

Two minutes more than was necessary but even that short time was interrupted both by Labour’s Thomas Docherty calling vexatious points of order and even a bizarre intervention from Bone’s own side when even the Tory whips inadvertently objected to the proposal.

Bone’s bill is plainly silly but the EU referendum legislation isn’t much better.

Labour’s Wayne David derided the whole farrago as a “consitutional nonsense” because the bill has no chance of making it into law despite Friday’s vote which saw it pass its second reading in the Commons by 304 votes to nil not only because either Labour or the Lords will wreck it before it gets that far but because parliaments cannot pass legislation binding their successor. If they could it would cripple the business of government.

Labour could have passed laws before their inevitable ejection at the last election binding whoever followed them to certain spending plans for example or forcing the next government to blow raspberries at the end of every announcement for that matter.

The debate itself was disappointingly dismal given the anticipation on the Conservative benches beforehand.

But the MPs were colourful if the speeches weren’t. Many were decked out in Friday attire, Culture Secretary Maria Miller was resplendent in a floaty white outfit.

Jackie Doyle-Price managed the unenviable feat of giving a speech so dull she was upstaged by her own tights, which sported an odd pattern. Cornwall member Sheryll Murray donned Union Jack shoes for the occasion and was seen before the debate giving out homemade badges. No wonder one Labour backbencher compared the atmosphere to that of a sixth form debating society.

The high point came when lone Lib Dem Martin Horwood the rest of the party sat out the sitting and Horwood was left behind just in case something unexpected happened intervened to complain when Labour firebrand Ian Davidson described the Liberal Democrats as “snivellers”.

Horwood, a plain and unremarkable chap, announced he was going to tear up his Unite membership card in light of the irregularities that trade union appears to have been involved in surrounding the Labour selection process in Falkirk. Horwood offered to give the pieces to Davidson after the debate so he could do with them what he will.

Davidson replied: “Can I suggest he doesn’t tempt me to do what I like with it, because what I would like to do with it is not necessarily what he would enjoy. Unless he is not the man I think he is.”