Blog - Richard Corbett

UK Labour MEP from 1996 to 2009

Monday, February 21, 2005

So the Spanish people voted yes to the constitution, overwhelmingly. While this might not be a surprise – Spain has always been staunchly pro-European – it is still good news. Four down, twenty-one to go.

Predictably, the UK media has tried to find a way to interpret the result negatively. They must have struggled, because they’ve eventually settled on complaining about the turnout. 42% is admittedly pretty low, but we always knew it would be low – with both main parties in favour, opinion polls predicting a large victory, and everyone recognising the result as completely uncontroversial. If it had been a more close-fought contest, I suspect voters would have turned out in their droves.

Besides, there is a whiff of hypocrisy here. The turnout in the first Irish referendum on the Nice treaty, which narrowly rejected the treaty, was down in the thirties – yet Eurosceptics hailed that as a triumph for democracy!

Labels: ,