Jim Murphy

I have had to suspend my 'No Thanks' independence referendum tour of Scotland. It was back in June that I announced my plan to tour the country.  A hundred events.  All outdoors in Scotland's summer.  Me, my makeshift stage of two upturned Irn-bru crates, a microphone, one of those small speaker-amps, a one or two-strong road crew, take it to the streets. 'From Barrhead to Barra' was my catchline.   Barrhead is in my constituency and is synonymous with an industrial Scotland, a half hour’s drive from Glasgow.  Barra is another Scotland, twelve hundred largely Gaelic-speaking fishers and crofters at the southern end of the Western Isles archipelago.  The tour is old school politics, reconnecting. Thousands of people have taken part.

‘If someone in the UK is calling for a referendum, that is not because the text we have in front of us is a Constitution.’ Not my words. They belong to Giuliano Amato, vice chairman of the Convention that drafted the old Constitutional Treaty. Last week in the Spectator the government was accused of being dishonest regarding the European Reform Treaty (‘Vote for honesty’, 15 September). We are not. We did indeed promise a referendum on the old Constitutional Treaty. But the Reform Treaty is not a Constitution. In June, all 27 leaders of the Member States of the European Union took the same view, declaring ‘the Constitutional concept has been abandoned’.