Miliband condemns them as the refuge of dictators – Referenda. It means what we say it means

Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, speaking about the clamour for a referendum on the recently rubberstamped ‘treaty’ attempted to claim they were the “refuge of dictators and demagogues ”, as has been much noted in the blogsphere.

He went on: “We have a parliamentary democracy. We elect MPs every four of five years, the people elect us to do a job. If they like it they re-elect us if they don’t kick us out,”

What he carefully failed to mention was that his party, presumably being comprised of, in his view, dictators and demagogues had promised a referendum on the EU Constitution.

Well if the cap fits…

The people indeed elected Nu-Lab to do a job – that included ensuring that the people had the opportunity to express their will in a referendum. To ensure that no more of Parliament’s privileges and power were given away to Brussels without the people having a specific say in the matter.

The vote may have gone a different way, had they known in advance that the likes of Brown and Miliband would renege on their manifesto promise using the pathetically thin excuse that it was no longer a referendum because a tiny proportion of the words in the treaty had been changed.

Milliband and Brown are presumably still quite happy to claim that they were the actual people who were elected, given how many of the cells in their bodies have died and been replaced since that election. They can’t so easily claim to have a mandate.

The ‘treaty’ probably contains no less a proportion of the original constitution than they do of the physical matter that they were made of when elected.