When will European federalists seek a democratic mandate?

When the New Statesman was revamped last year I complained about the prominence it now gives to comedians:

My great era of reading the Statesman was the late 1970s, and I have been trying to think what the magazine would have been like if it had taken the same approach then.

Something like this, I imagine:

* Freddie "Parrot-Face" Davies on the future of the Common Market;

* Dickie Henderson on the Palestine Question.

And next week:

* Mike and Bernie Winters debate the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy.

I remembered this when I saw Jeremy Hargreaves quoting the comedian Marcus Brigstocke to make the case against a referendum on the EU reform treaty. Jeremy describes an event at the Hackney Empire where Brigstocke asked the audience if anyone supported a referendum on the treaty. When a few people cheered, he continued:

Yes - we support having a referendum because it’s our democratic right.

Our democratic right - to vote in a referendum on a document we haven’t read

A document we have no intention of reading

Our democratic right to vote on something that we haven’t even read a summary of

A document we don’t even know anyone who has read.

But we want a referendum because it’s our democratic right.

Jeremy regards this as a clinching argument against a referendum:

Of course you can run through lots of familiar arguments about one of the features of democracy being people voting on issues in which they are not experts. But in a democratic vote people do normally have at least some general idea of the implications of voting one way or the other.

Note the use of the word "familiar". It reminds me of the way that authoritarian politicians talk about "predictable" complaints when they propose some draconian new measure. In both cases there is the unspoken implication that if an argument has been heard before it is somehow devalued and can therefore be ignored. This is, of course, a wholly illegitimate way of reasoning.

These arguments are "familiar" because the ability of the average citizen to challenge the policies of the experts lies at the heart of democracy. If I were writing this at home I would take down my copy of volume 1 of The Open and Society and its Enemies and quote chunks of Popper on the subject.

As it is, I shall merely point out that at some stage European federalists will have to win the support of the British people for their project. As I wrote in August:

The most important issue at the past three general elections ought to have been Britain's relations with Europe - first the single currency and later the proposed new European constitution. Instead these questions have been consistently dodged by the government promising referendums on them at some unspecified future dates.

If we are not to be allowed that referendum, the federalists will have to find a new way of keeping it out of the election campaign.

The current enthusiasm for a referendum on British membership of the EU tout court seems to me a calculated attempt to prevent what may well be the majority view of the electorate - that they are in favour of European economic cooperation but wary of further political integration - being given effective expression.

I am agnostic on the deeper European project and remain open to conviction. But if federalists never dare put their case to the people, how will anyone ever be converted?