This article first appeared in Liberal Democrat News in May 2002.

Over the next few months and years voters will be asking Liberal Democrats about Europe on the doorstep about more and more. The Liberal Democrat European Group (LDEG) is preparing hard to equip campaigners with the information and support they will need to answer those questions.

Firstly, it seems that there may well be a referendum on the Euro next year. And if the Prime Minister should finally achieve the feat of agreeing with his Chancellor on this rather key issue, and call a referendum, we must be ready to go. Charles has been taking a strong lead. As he told the Welsh party conference just last month: “We have to go out and sell the advantages of the euro. We have to tell people about the extra jobs it will bring, the lower mortgages, the cheaper prices and the boost to trade.”

LDEG is putting together the campaigning materials to help us do this. We publish a wide range of briefings (all available on our website, www.ldeg.org), giving facts and figures in an accessible way about the benefits of Britain joining the single currency. We also answer some of the points made by our opponents against joining the euro.

We also have produced and sold at recent conferences a collection of badges, balloons, stickers and we are now producing more campaigning materials. Over the next few months we will be organising training events around the country for party members on the Euro. If you would like to come along to these, please visit our website.

And secondly, in only two years we will face European elections again. We need to be able to go out there and explain why having more MEPs who are Liberal Democrats will help Europe to tackle the concerns of British voters. And this doesn’t mean only supporting our active engagement in the European Union, it means being critical where we think the EU is wrong. For example, the way the EU institutions work often seems deliberately designed to alienate and exclude voters, and we can make it clear that the more Lib Dem MEPs are elected, the harder they can push for Europe to be more democratic. We can also tell them of some of the work that our MEPs have done since being elected which affects their daily lives, in areas from cheaper phone bills to better factory working conditions. Our website has more details on many of these, and links to others. And of course we organise the ever-popular information visits to Brussels.

In 1999 we achieved a huge breakthrough in winning ten MEPs, not just in winning more Parliamentarians to vote for what we believe in, but in the encouragement and help they have been able to give to many of our regions. We need to ensure that we retain and expand our number of MEPs at the next European Parliament elections in June 2004.

Liberal Democrats need to go out there and argue for what we believe in on the doorstep. No-one else is going to do it: as Charles told an audience earlier this year, “I’d call on Tony Blair to have the courage of his convictions on Europe if I could really be sure that he had either courage or convictions on this issue.”

Jeremy Hargreaves is Vice Chair of the Lib Dem European Group.