When I first heard it suggested that the UK should hold a referendum on remaining in the EU or not, I was sceptical about the idea. Referendums do have their place, but I don’t generally think they are the best way of making government decisions.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more and more I have come round to the idea that asking the public, basically, whether they want Britain to do the Europe thing or not, is a good idea.

Essentially, the case for such a vote is straightforward. There clearly are different views among the British public about whether they want the UK to be part of the EU or not - so why shouldn’t we ask them?

The European Reform Treaty is mainly made up of provisions about detailed procedure, which I think the public are entitled to think are what they elect politicians to worry about, rather than have to read the whole thing themselves.

And in fact, of course, the great majority of the public would do no such thing, and simply vote on a much more basic feeling about what they think about the EU (I’ve written before about the evidence for this). So in fact if we did have a referendum nominally on the Reform Treaty, in fact what people would really be voting about would be a vague general sense of what they thought about the EU.

So why don’t we actually have a vote on the real question, whether Britain wants to be part of the EU or not? Unlike the Reform Treaty, it is not a technical question about details, but a big political one: do you want to be part of the EU or not. It’s the question that the public want to vote on, and what the public should decide on, the big political questions.

So we should let them. And although I’ve always been sceptical of the view that having a referendum would ”˜force us to have the debate’, the run-up to it would encourage some debate about this important and relatively simple big question, rather than the minutiae of whether the chairmanship of the EU Agriculture session should last for 6 months or two and a half years, and the like (which a referendum on the reform treaty would be partly about).

I also think it’s a good question for the Liberal Democrats to ask for. Frankly I doubt that Gordon Brown will accept this call - but if he does, I would be delighted, for the reasons I’ve set out above.

But having such a referendum would also help us all to understand better where the Conservatives stand.

Would they vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

A lot of Cameron’s supporters would clearly want him to campaign for Britain to leave the EU. But would he really want to do that - deep down, the intelligent man in him must know that that would not possibly be in Britain’s interests - and that it would not too, be in the interests of his attempt to portray his new model Conservative party as withdrawing from the extreme fringes of politics.

So - a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU would help to clarify, if not once and for all then for a generation, whether Britain should be part of this project or not. Obviously I have my own view, and others take an opposing position. Let’s take it to the public.

Do the British people want to be part, as at present, of our system of European governance? It’s exactly the sort of decision that the British people should be making - so let’s take it to the public and let them decide.