Miliband bides his time on question of EU membership

For months, one of the key questions in Westminster has been whether Labour leader Ed Miliband would be bounced into supporting the idea of a European Union referendum in the lifetime of the next British parliament.

Yesterday, Miliband made his call: there will be a straight In or Out membership question posed to voters the next time London signs up to an EU treaty that entails the surrender of more powers to Westminster to Brussels.

However, that day is a long way off, he argues. Indeed, it is so long off that it will not happen in before 2020. Therefore, Miliband is telling voters that they will have a question to answer, but not any time soon.

One of Miliband’s nightmares is that he would become prime minister in 2015 faced with a referendum on membership of the European Union already set in stone for 2017 – the date set down by David Cameron in his Bloomberg speech 15 months ago.

In such an environment, Cameron would have quit; a deeply Eurosceptic candidate would have taken over the leadership of the Conservatives, leaving Miliband to face into a rabid campaign facing the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party trying to outdo each other.

He has gambled on not playing the Conservatives’ game. No 10 Downing Street was gleeful in the wake of Miliband’s speech to the London Business School, believing that it now has a stick with which to beat him for the next 15 months until the May 2015 election.

The EU needs to be reformed, he insisted, adding that the British people “have reached the point where they don’t want to see further transfers of power from Britain to the EU without their consent”.

However, his route to reform is far from clear.

By mid-afternoon, Cameron had emailed Conservative supporters: “Ed Miliband has made his position crystal clear – there will be no referendum under Labour. Only the Conservatives will guarantee and deliver that referendum. It will only happen if I am prime minister.”

Opinion polls suggests that if voters are specifically asked their opinions on the UK’s membership of the EU, then more than 40 per cent say that they want to quit; a third, or a little more, say they want to stay, while the rest are undecided.

However, the issue is rarely volunteered by people at the doorstep, canvassers in most parties say.

The effects of EU membership – such as eastern European immigration – do come up, but not necessarily the EU itself.

Unlike Cameron, Miliband can be reasonably certain that all bar a few of his party will unite behind his declaration yesterday, or stay sullenly quiet if they do not agree, rather than come out in open revolt. But he must now hope that British voters take a similar attitude.