When the LDEG Executive met for our annual committee planning meeting at the start of June 2005, it was a very different year of activities that we found ourselves planning than we had expected. A few months ago anyone predicting such a shock as the rejection of the whole Constitution by France would have been laughed down. That vote certainly doesn’t mean the end of the EU as we know it, but it will take a long time ago for the Union to recover from the shock and work out what its consequences really will be.

The confused mess it leaves does not make for a happy in-tray or an easy six months for an incoming EU Council Presidency; I think we may however allow ourselves a moment’s schadenfreude that the Presidency which will have to bear the brunt of sorting out this mess is led by a man who by his neglect, wrongheadedness and weakness of principle over the last eight years, has done so much to contribute to the problems of the EU.

So LDEG is not after all planning for a major referendum campaign over the next twelve months. But this does not mean we will be doing nothing!

We will have as usual a major presence at party conference in Blackpool, with two fringe meetings, a vibrant stall, and we hope a training session or two for the party on busting European myths.

The abortive referendum campaign hasn’t hurt LDEG’s own development too, and among the LDEG members receiving this are more than 100 new members who have joined us as a result of the recruitment campaign we have run over the last few months.

We will again also have a presence at many other party events, such as regional conferences, through the autumn. In November our next information trip will visit Brussels, and other activities such as the Newsletter of course continue.

But we also want to focus our energies on new projects, and we have particularly identified as a priority working better with our MPs in Westminster.

One of the things in the Constitution which it has always seemed to me odd that we needed the EU to tell us to do better, was the improvement in scrutiny by MPs in Westminster (and other national Parliaments) of those among their own number who as Ministers go and sit as part of the EU legislature, the Council. We will be making promoting more effective scrutiny of the EU by national Parliaments one of our key themes of the next few months.

We will also continue to work closely with other organisations in the broader pro-European campaign, such as the European Movement. For although we do not now find ourselves faced with the prospect of an immediate referendum, personally I believe that sitting back and relaxing would be absolutely the wrong thing for us to do now.

For amongst the sadness at the French vote, I must confess to feeling relief that they had avoided us having to have one in this country. I do not believe we could have won a referendum over the next few months – partly because of the opinion poll numbers stacked against us, but partly because, insofar as the Government had a strategy for trying to win it at all, it was the wrong strategy. They believed that they could do nothing for the next year, and then turn public opinion round in just a short three-month campaign. This flies in the face of all the experience both from European referendums in other countries, and from referendums on other issues in this country. The only justification they could come up with for such a strategy unfortunately owed more to a desire to justify their inaction, than reason – while it is true that public opinion was brought round to a yes vote in quite a short period before the 1975 referendum, political campaigning in those days was entirely different to what it is now. The Labour party, of all parties, would not dream of learning any other lessons from their style of campaigning in the 1970s, and they only wanted to follow it in this because it told them what they wanted to hear.

The truth is that even though we never actually had a referendum in this country, it was lost some ten or fifteen years ago, ever since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, or Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech in 1988. Since then anti-Europeanism has taken over in Britain – driven largely by a very effective campaign by both the official and unofficial anti-European campaigns, which worked out a simple message that the EU is synonymous with interfering bureaucrats who want to regulate ridiculous minutiae, and has repeated this relentlessly to the point where it has now become established fact.

At some point over the next ten or fifteen years, there will be a referendum in the UK on some aspect of the EU (it doesn’t really matter which). If we are to win that then, we need to start now to develop the kind of effective campaign which will start to turn round the supertanker of public opinion, so that in 2015 or 2020 we have a hope of winning it.

Through spreading greater information and understanding about the EU, and telling voters till they are sick of hearing it of the benefits which votes cast by Lib Dem MEPs in the European Parliament have brought to them, we are already starting to do this. I hope as many LDEG members as possible will want to join in our efforts and help us do this as widely and effectively as possible.