Here is an e-mail I have sent to Kate Hoey copy to my own MP Malcolm Wicks:

Dear Ms Hoey,

I heard you on today’s "World this weekend" talking about your support for the referendum on the EU so-called constituion. This particular referendum commitment should of course never have been made. Deciding on the acceptability or otherwise of such a matter requires skills and knowledge which the ordinary citizen does not have. Indeed if this referendum is held what proportion of the population do you suppose will have read the Treaty, much less understood it. To deal with such matters we have MP’s. (Under our crazy electoral system they may not be the right MP’s but they are all we have got!).

However I would agree with you, that since the commitment was given in the manifesto it should, without any doubt at all, be honoured, otherwise the party will be guilty of bad faith and puttting politicans in a worse light than they are already.

I have said above that this particular referendum should never have been promised. I would go further and say that, since we are allegedly a REPRESENTATIVE democracy, referendums should be very rare indeed: I would go so far as to suggest that there is only one sound reason for holding a referendum: to discover from the population at large how they want to elect their representatives, ie to take this decision out of the hands of MP’s, who will always vote for the system under which THEY were elected, and put it in the hands of the electorate where it properly belongs.

This brings me to the reason why I am typing this e-mail in the first place.We regularly hear MP’s of all parties, as well of course of the Little Englanders ,sounding off about the disgraceful way the government appears to be reneging on the "Constitution" referendum. But we never hear a squeak out of any of them, certainly not among the Labour MP’s, about a referendum to which NEW Labour committed itself in 1997. Here word for word is what was in the manifesto:-

"We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. An independent commission on voting systems will be appointed early to recommend a proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post system."

There were no "ifs" and "buts": it was quite unequivocal. There was no suggestion that this referendum would be cynically reneged on, or that Jenkins would be appointed to head the commission only for his report to be booted into the long grass where it has remained. Nor was there any suggestion that there would be a temporising so- called review "promised" in 2001 (even this was stamped on by the party’s arch- tribalists) and 2005 manifestos , which would finally result in a "report" AFTER TEN YEARS, with (surprise! surprise! ) a conclusion , that we all anticipated: that Westminster alone in the EU should hang onto the antediluvian first-past-the-post system.

So are we witnessing a new spirit of honour in NEW Labour: a concern for honouring unequivocal manifesto commitments . And if so can we expect, at last from Labour MP’s, similar outrage about the disgraceful abandonment of the 1997 commitment as some are expressing about the "Constitution " . And can we, the voters, after Jenkins’s recommended educational process, at long last hope to be able decide how we should choose a truly representative Parliament.

Best wishes

Joe Patterson (a former member of the party who resigned, precisely on the cynical abandonment of the 1997 referendum commitment)