{"id":1160,"date":"2007-09-02T18:11:26","date_gmt":"2007-09-02T18:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/ministers-pledge-to-fight-growing-calls-for-eu-treaty-referendum\/1160\/"},"modified":"2007-09-02T18:11:26","modified_gmt":"2007-09-02T18:11:26","slug":"ministers-pledge-to-fight-growing-calls-for-eu-treaty-referendum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/ministers-pledge-to-fight-growing-calls-for-eu-treaty-referendum\/","title":{"rendered":"Ministers pledge to fight growing calls for EU treaty referendum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"bodyCopyContent\">By <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/news.independent.co.uk\/uk\/politics\/article2919641.ece\">Marie Woolf<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ministers, including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are set to come out fighting this week against growing demands for a EU treaty referendum.<\/p>\n<p>Government sources say that a string of ministers will &#8220;make it clear&#8221; that the Government has a mandate for the new reform treaty, given at the European Council in June. The Government came under growing pressure last week to refuse to rule out a referendum. But the Prime Minister is expected to firmly rule out a referendum later this week.<\/p>\n<p>The move follows intense pressure on Gordon Brown from members of his own party. A campaign led by the Labour MP Ian Davidson, who said that up to a third of Labour MPs could back calls for an EU treaty, was joined by the former Europe minister, Keith Vaz, on Friday. He said: &#8220;We should not be afraid of actually putting this argument before the British people. We don&#8217;t need a referendum on the reformed treaty because we didn&#8217;t have one on the Nice Treaty or on Maastricht. But I think there&#8217;s a difference between need and desirability.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think once and for all we need to put this behind us by putting it to the British people. I am absolutely convinced that we will win any test of public opinion as to whether or not the British people want us in Europe.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Marie Woolf Ministers, including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are set to come out fighting this week against growing demands for a EU treaty referendum. Government sources say that a string of ministers will &#8220;make it clear&#8221; that the Government has a mandate for the new reform treaty, given at the European Council in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[93],"class_list":{"0":"post-1160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-latest-news","7":"tag-eu"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}