DAVID CAMERON was never going to lose the House of Commons vote on October 24th on whether Britain should hold a referendum on its membership of the European Union (eu). The Labour Party, which shared his opposition to the idea, ensured that he wouldn't. The motion, put forward by one of the many Eu-rosceptic mps in the prime minister's Conservative Party, would not have been binding for the government in any case. In and of itself, then, the vote was not very important. But it did reveal several things that are. First, it exposed the scale of Euroscepticism in the Tory party: 81 of its mps defied both Mr Cameron's pleas and a three-line whip to support the motion. It envisaged a plebiscite with three options on the ballot: remaining in the eu, outright withdrawal, and renegotiation of the terms of British membership. This was the biggest ever Tory rebellion over Europe, no mean feat. In a free vote, still more mps would have voted for a referendum. In the 1980s and 1990s the Tories were split between pro-Europeans and those who feared a loss of sovereignty to Brussels. Most of the former, who were moved in their youth by the post-war idealism of the European project, have retired from front-line politics. Only Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, is left from a group that included cabinet ministers such as Michael Heseltine and Chris Patten. These days Tories disagree only on how to go about achieving their Eurosceptic aims.
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