I was extremely pleased to see the fuss that Lib Dem MPs, led by Ed, deliberately made yesterday about their call for a referendum on Britain’s future membership of the EU. It was an excellent way of drawing attention to this Lib Dem call (which I have strongly supported here).

The Lisbon Treaty is obviously the particular document under discussion at the moment - but the referendum that people really want, is on the key question of whether Britain should remain part of the EU or not - not about details such as exactly how many Members of the European Parliament there should be, or the exact number of weeks that national Parliaments should have to object to any proposed European legislation, which is the kind of stuff the Lisbon Treaty is made up of.

When people express their concern about the EU they are not talking about this kind of detail but fundamentally whether we should part of it or not. (Indeed many normal voters I have spoken to over the years have expressed this as “I don’t think we should go into Europe” which says a lot about the false chimera of a “federal Europe” that people are scared of, rather than the reality of a pretty federal Europe that we already now live in - but that’s a topic for another post!).

So I’m glad that the Lib Dems are calling for the British people to make a decision about whether we should continue to be part of the EU or not.

It also seems to have rumbled the UK Independence Party. This is, of course, a party for whom it is not just a major policy, but its entire raison d’etre, to want Britain to leave the EU.

But when a referendum which would achieve precisely that is proposed, they umm and ahh and eventually concede reluctantly that this is what they want ‘in the long term’. They are entirely focussed on the very immediate and narrow issue of the Lisbon Treaty, and not the issue that they claim is their party’s entire reason for existence.

This is somewhat equivalent to the Leader of the Liberal Democrats being offered the chance to implement the Liberal Democrat programme for government straightaway, and turning it down saying that maybe we could think about it in twenty years’ time. It is completely incoherent, even by the standards of UKIP.

And I’m also glad of yesterday’s incident because it is the Lib Dems using the extraordinary procedures of our Parliament to our advantage.

It is always tempted when you’re elected to a club, whatever it is, to go native and regard its rules as more important than anything else. The House of Commons is highly seductive in this regard and is packed full of people who think the most important thing is the House of Commons itself.

This would be fine but such people forget that it is actually supposed to be responsible for governing the country, not merely its own procedural motions. (A good example of this was Ed yesterday being banned from Parliament ‘for a day’ - a colleague I was sitting with when watching this told me that the Parliamentary definition of a ‘day’ varies, and sometimes can last as long as several months”¦)

For as long as the other two parties refuse to make any serious steps to run Parliament in a sensible and modern way, like any other Parliament, I hope the Lib Dems continue to take full advantage of it to get our message across.