COVENTRY MESSAGE BOARD

Ed Miliband is facing a furious backlash from his MPs and donors after he ruled out an automatic referendum on Britain's membership to the European Union.



Mr Miliband, the Labour leader, said that under a Labour government Britain will only hold a referendum on leaving the European Union if there is a "significant transfer of powers" from Westminster to Brussels - a prospect he describes as "unlikely".

In an article for the Financial Times he added that Labour will not match the Conservative's pledge to hold an automatic referendum in three years’ time, saying his priorities are "very different".

However Labour party donor John Mills, the JML home shopping entrepreneur and chair of Labour for a Referendum, insisted there should be an in-out vote "regardless of future events".

Graham Stringer, a backbench Labour MP, attacked Mr Miliband's stance on the referendum as a "shoddy compromise" and so ambigious it will be "impossible" for Labour MPs to sell to voters on the doorstep.

Mr Mills, who gave the party shares in JML valued at £1.65 million in January last year, said: "While Ed Miliband's pledge of an in-out referendum is a welcome one, there is often disagreement over what constitutes a 'transfer of powers' from Britain to the EU.

"The British people still feel short changed, for instance, by the absence of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which sent substantial powers to Brussels without public consultation.

"I want to see a Labour government in 2015 and, as the party that trusts the people, I think we should recognise that the growth of the EU's influence over Britain in the past 40 years warrants a referendum regardless of future events."

Mr Stringer, the MP for Blackley and Broughton, said: "I think it's a shoddy compromise really, between those people in the Parliamentary Labour Party who want a referendum because the vast majority of the electorate want it, and those people desperate not to have a referendum," he said.

"I think the public are very clear that they want a referendum. This is so ambiguous as to be impossible to sell on the doorstep.

John Mann, a senior Labour MP, added that swing voters in his constituency were "unequivocally" demanding a vote on membership with the EU.

Mr Mann told BBC Radio 4's World Tonight. "Certainly I've polled very (extensively) Labour voters in my area, and without question, they're more hostile than they were to the European Union - significantly more so - and I think that we need to be in touch and we need to be trusting the people."

"So I hope that over the next few months he'll go further and say that the Labour Party's going to trust the people and let the people have a say on this."

Mr Miliband’s comments bring Labour into line with the Liberal Democrats, who have said they will only hold an in-out referendum in the event of a significant transfer of powers to or from Brussels.