EU Referendum

Voting against your own Party is not an easy thing to do.

It’s not the threats from the Whips that make you wonder if you are really doing the right thing – it’s knowing that the media are bound to interpret any difference of opinion as being a personal humiliation for the Party leader.

So let me be absolutely clear; I think David Cameron is doing a good job.

I’m proud to support a Government that is taken the difficult, but necessary choices, to reform our welfare system so that it pays to work, to get a grip on immigration and – most importantly – to rebuild our economy after the disastrous deficit-fuelled recession created by Labour.

But I also know that my first loyalty must always be to do what I think is right for the people I represent in Halesowen and Rowley Regis.

That is why, last Monday, I was one of 81 Conservative MPs to vote against a “three-line whip” – the greatest sin that any new backbench MP can commit – and support a referendum on whether Britain should continue to be a member of the European Union.

I may be in my mid-forties, married with two children, but – like nearly two-thirds of voters – that still makes me much too young to have been able to vote in the last European referendum in 1975.

Since then, the Common Market was replaced by the European Community, which in turn became the European Union, all without asking the British people for their approval.

People rightly felt let down when Tony Blair promised voters a referendum on the European constitution, only to then say that no referendum was needed because the EU had changed the title from constitution to Lisbon Treaty.

David Cameron has changed the law so that powers can never again be transferred from Britain to Brussels without a referendum. That’s a good start but we need to go further.

The Government’s localism agenda is all about passing powers to local people.

Whether giving neighbourhoods a strong voice in local planning policy or making police forces accountable to directly-elected police commissioners, we are working to give people more of a say in how things are run. We know that politicians don’t always know best.
It is time that we applied the same principles to our membership of the EU.

I believe that it is right for voters to choose whether we should stay in, pull out or renegotiate our membership of the EU. That is why I believe that we must have a referendum and let the people decide.