"As many people know by now, I am often considered by my own party as fundamentally unsound on matters European," writes Somerton and Frome MP David Heath. "I have never been keen on the euro (for reasons that have been proved right over the last year or so), I have always argued for less centralised bureaucracy and more devolution of power away from Brussels and towards member countries and communities within them, I have always pushed for greater transparency, and I have consistently called for there to be opportunities for the British people to have their say about changes which affect our constitutional arrangements. That is why I have been a member of various campaigns for a referendum, and why I felt it necessary to resign from my front-bench role a few years ago to vote in favour of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

"This week the issue has been in the news again, as a result of the e-petition site (which I  helped set up) in the first instance, and the newly instituted back-bench business committee, which can now order the business of the House of Commons when we are not considering legislation, and quite rightly doesn’t feel the need to necessarily make life easy for the government. As most will know, the motion, which called for a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union, was heavily defeated by the fact that all three main parties opposed it, but not before a significant number of Conservative and, to a lesser extent, Labour rebels had expressed a contrary view.

"So why did the government, and for that matter the opposition, oppose the motion? Three principal reasons. The first is that it was the wrong question. The suggestion was that there should be three options presented in a referendum. Not a simple in-out question, or a proposition which people would be asked to agree to, but a choice of in, out, or shake it about, in ways yet to be specified. Had we had a referendum on such a basis, it is entirely possible that the outcome would be so ill-defined as to be useless.

"Second, it could not be a worse time to be asking such a question. The economic upsets sweeping Europe, and particularly the eurozone, have made things extraordinarily precarious at the moment. The instability resulting from a real threat of the UK unilaterally withdrawing could create disaster, just at the time when the prospects for real longer-term change on a multilateral basis in the direction most people would appear to want have never been a more realistic prospect. Secure those changes and  we can have a referendum, on a new settlement. Do so now and you risk triggering complete collapse of our fragile recovery.

"But thirdly, and importantly, we have already dealt with the issue. We’ve passed legislation which means we will have a referendum, by law,  if there is any further treaty change which changes the UK’s position within  the EU in future. That’s exactly what we promised, in party manifestos and in the coalition agreement. And that’s what we delivered, after months of detailed debate. Why would we then want to tear up that decision on the basis of a single afternoon’s debate?"