CREC ‘Purple Postcards’ to the Queen.

We’ll try to update you on our home page with the number of cards distributed in our latest campaign, which we started on 21 December 2007. By mid-April, we’d distributed over 190,500 cards. We hope to reach our target of 250,000 cards distributed before the end of the Parliamentary debates on this Bill.

It is expected that the Lisbon Treaty will go for final approval by the House of Commons around the end of May, or maybe during June. So there is still plenty of time and opportunity to distribute more cards and maximise the number received by the Queen.

CREC received a friendly letter from the Queen’s chief correspondence secretary which has encouraged us in our endeavours. By convention, private correspondence to and from the Queen is not published.

News item added 16 April 2008 

The Lisbon Treaty bill is currently before the House of Lords, which has 747 voting members.

In a few weeks’ time, the Lords will vote on an amendment to this Bill. The amendment will propose that the British people be given a referendum on the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, as we have been promised.

During March, CREC wrote a personal letter to all voting members of the House of Lords, including the 16 Bishops, urging them to vote for a referendum. We reproduce the text of our letter below.

Please also click on the page ‘Letters from Members of the House of Lords’ to view a selection of the many responses we have had from individual Lords to date:

Dear Member of the House of Lords - 21 March 2008

An appeal to you to allow us a referendum

The simple purpose of our letter is to plead with you to allow us, the British people, a vote on the terms of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution. We understand that on 1 April there will be a Second Reading in the Lords of the Bill to implement the Treaty. Thereafter, during the Committee stage, there will be a motion put to your Lordships that the terms of this Treaty be the subject of a referendum, and that Britain should only ratify the Treaty if we, the people, approve it.

Before explaining why we urge you to grant us a referendum, we should just introduce CREC to you. We formed in March 2003 and were best known for developing a postcard campaign. Members of the public signed and posted numbered, pre-addressed postcards to The Queen, urging her to withhold Royal Assent from any Bill to implement the European Constitution, unless and until we, the British people, had approved its terms in a fair referendum.

During this campaign, we received a letter from Her Majesty’s Chief Correspondence Secretary, Ms Deborah Bean, stating that: “The Queen has personally asked to be regularly briefed on the numbers of postcards being received”.  We terminated our campaign in May 2004 when Prime Minister Tony Blair promised the House of Commons and the people that we would have a referendum. During that campaign,  which lasted just over a year, we circulated 175,000 postcards.

We revived our campaign on 21 December this year when it became clear that it was likely that our politicians would persist in refusing us a referendum. It is a measure of the depth of anger felt in the country at the government breaking its promise to hold a referendum that, without any publicity save what appears on our website, we have already distributed the same number of cards - 175,000 - in just three months. We are pleased to enclose with this letter a sample postcard. These have become commonly known as ‘the purple postcard’. We are non-party political and have hundreds of members.

There are a great many powerful reasons why your Lordships should, on this occasion, vote contrary to the recent 311 to 248 vote in the Commons to deny the people a referendum. We summarise the main reasons below:

(1) First, the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution gives power to European institutions to remove further powers from national Parliaments without their consent

All the analyses we have seen show that in addition to the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution weakening the powers of national institutions and extending the power of European institutions, such as the Presidency and the Foreign Affairs role, various Articles in the Treaty create entirely new provisions for the European institutions to take more powers to themselves without the consent of national Parliaments, which is still required at the moment. This is a crucial  reason why we believe it is absolutely essential and unarguable that this Treaty be voted on by the British people.

(2) The provisions of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution are virtually the same as those of the rejected European Constitution 

To prove that, we need look no further than the Commons European Security Committee, who described the E.U. Reform Treaty as ‘substantially equivalent’ to the European Constitution. We could produce countless quotations from European leaders who fully concede that the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution is essentially the same as the former European Constitution. Here are just two. First, in a meeting of the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee last year, Giscard d’Estaing, the original architect of the European Constitution, said: “The changes compared to the original European Constitution are few and far between and more cosmetic than real”. Secondly, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said: “The substance of the Constitution  is preserved. That is a fact”.

(3) To pass off the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution as different from the European Constitution is a deceit by the leaders of Europe

To prove that, we need look no further than this quotation from Valery Giscard d’Estaing: “The term ‘constitution’ has been dropped simply to make a few people happy. All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but they will be hidden and disguised in some way. We can get Europeans to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly.” Many other similar quotations from other European leaders could be produced.

(4) The Lisbon Treaty/Constitution in its previous form of the European Constitution was rejected by the French and the Dutch

The European Constitution was rejected by 55% of French voters and more than 62% of Dutch voters. There is, we believe, a very simple explanation why the European Constitution was rejected by such  significant majorities. It is this. Whilst perhaps the majority of people in those and other European countries consent to a certain level of co-operation and closer working between European nations, equally it seems clear that that majority does not consent to any further steps being taken to create a single European nation. They oppose further erosion of their nation’s political independence.

(5) There is the clearest possible evidence that the British people want a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution

Opinion polls have routinely put support for a referendum at well over 70% of the British people and some at over 90%. Then there were around 20 parish referendums held, which produced an average vote for a referendum of around 94%. Much more powerfully, the 10 constituency-wide referendums, paid for by the I Want a Referendum campaign and organised by the independent Electoral Reform Society, produced 88% support for a referendum, on a respectable turn-out of 36%. If you decide to cast your vote for a referendum, you will be doing so in the knowledge that 88% of the British people support you.

(6) To allow the British people a vote on this very important Treaty for the future of our nation would help to restore people’s faith in Parliament

We need not rehearse here the disillusionment there is amongst the British electorate with Parliament as an institution. The steep decline in the numbers voting in general and local elections speaks for itself. Recent revelations about payments to MPs’ relatives and extravagant claims for expenses have added to the feeling that those in Parliament are there mainly to feather their own nests and are increasingly out of touch with voters.  The people feel disconnected - a theme echoed by all political writers. To allow us a vote on this Treaty would help to restore trust in Parliament. There is a saying: ‘Trust the people’. It is a traditionally British way of doing things to have a thorough debate and then decide. We need a robust debate on whether the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution is good or bad for Britain and good or bad for Europe. We want and need our say on this issue.

(7) The British people have had no direct vote on the European issue since 1975

Since the referendum on whether we should stay in the Common Market held in 1975, the British people have been denied any further direct say on what has unquestionably been a gradual transfer of power away from our national Parliament and to the European institutions. No-one aged under 51 has had a chance therefore to have a direct say on this process. Please give them that chance.

(8) The three main political parties, including of course the governing party, made clear, unequivocal promises in their respective election manifestos to give the British people a referendum on the European Constitution or any similar Treaty

By the Salisbury Convention, your Lordships do not interfere with the governments of the day implementing their election manifestos. By the same token, there is a very powerful argument indeed that your Lordships should not act to deprive the people of a referendum when the governing party and the other two main parties have clearly promised us one in their manifestos.

(9) Finally - In June this year, the Irish government is allowing its people a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution. If Parliament does not allow the British people to vote on this Treaty, we will be seen to be less democratic than the Irish

The Irish government has fully accepted that the Lisbon Treaty/ Constitution involves very significant changes to the constitutional arrangements for the Irish people. Therefore it has granted them the right to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to this Treaty. It would surely be a matter of enduring shame were our Parliament to deny us the same right.

We and our many supporters would love to know if you will support our wish for a referendum.

If you have read all of our letter, we thank you very much for doing so. As many political writers have noted, the decision on whether to allow Britain to be ruled by the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution is an historic moment in our nation’s history. We therefore ask that you carefully consider the contents of our letter before deciding whether to deny or support the demand of so many of us for a referendum on this Treaty.

Please let us know if you have any objections to publishing your reply.

We await your reply.

Yours sincerely

Derek Norman  (Chairman, CREC)