BRITAIN:British foreign secretary David Miliband has again rejected calls for a referendum on the new EU constitutional reform treaty despite the issue's potential to complicate Gordon Brown's election calculations, writes Frank Millarin Bournemouth.
Addressing the Labour Party conference here yesterday, Mr Miliband dismissed what he called "institutional navel-gazing" and insisted parliament should decide the issue, despite a renewed warning that the Sun newspaper intends to press for a public vote "right up to election day".
With an October or November poll still not ruled out, Labour Eurosceptics believe Conservative leader David Cameron could force the prime minister's hand by including a commitment to hold a referendum in the Tory manifesto.
The suggestion has been that Mr Brown would then be obliged to follow suit.
In his speech yesterday, however, Mr Miliband underlined Mr Brown's position, rejecting claims that the new treaty is the previously proposed EU constitution in all but name.
"Europe needs to look out, not in, to the problems beyond its borders that define insecurity within our borders," declared the foreign secretary: "It doesn't need institutional navel-gazing, and that is why the reform treaty abandons fundamental constitutional reform and offers clear protections for national sovereignty."
Mr Miliband went on: "It should be studied and passed by parliament."
And he told Labour delegates: "To every Tory MP we should say: there are eight members of your shadow cabinet who voted against a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Europe has divided them for 15 years and it's not going to divide us."
Some well-informed commentators here believe Mr Brown has never intended to call a snap election and that the speculation has been part of a deliberate plot to destabilise a troubled Conservative Party ahead of its conference in Blackpool next week.
Against that, others who were originally highly sceptical now think Mr Brown and his aides have no choice but to proceed and that the prime minister risks being portrayed as having a failure of nerve if he backs away from an early contest.
If Mr Brown does decide on an October or November poll, however, his rejection of the EU referendum demand would further raise the stakes in what would already be seen as a remarkable gamble by the new prime minister after just three months in 10 Downing Street.
Assuming the early election option is being seriously considered - and the leadership has done nothing to dispel the belief that it is - the implication of the Brown-Miliband position is that the re-election of the government would amount to endorsement of the treaty and the new parliament's subsequent approval of it.
Despite Labour's lead in the opinion polls, that would hand Mr Cameron a hugely populist weapon and severely test the loyalty of newspapers like the Sun which backed Tony Blair through three successive election victories.
"Not his finest hour" was the paper's verdict yesterday on Mr Brown's big conference speech, widely interpreted here as setting out his "manifesto" and reported elsewhere as Mr Brown's pitch for wavering Conservative voters in middle England.
"Gordon Brown [on Monday] hailed the decency, integrity and intelligence of the British people," declared its editorial. "Then he insulted us all by breaking his word and Labour's election promise of a referendum on the new EU constitution."
Mr Brown on Monday had accepted his responsibility to write in detail into the amended treaty "the red lines" his government had negotiated.
But the editorial concluded: "That may be his responsibility. If he believes this treaty is good for Britain, he should be prepared to take it to the British people so we can make up our own minds. It is his sworn duty to give the final say to the people of Britain. He is forgetting his promise. We intend to keep reminding him - right up to election day."
Other headline responses to Mr Brown's conference speech in what is loosely called the "Tory press" yesterday were more favourable, with Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail describing it as "a smash and grab raid" on David Cameron's policy programme.
However, Labour strategists may have found cause for caution in mixed reviews which questioned how his extensive list of promises was to be realised, not least at a time when public spending looks set to fall sharply.