This will not be like Maastricht

The Lisbon treaty may not have an easy journey to ratification, but it has very little in common with John Major's early 1990s nightmare
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It's been a bit like a political I heart 90s nostalgia programme for the last few days, but with Sir Teddy Taylor instead of Jenny Eclair. As the Lisbon treaty begins its parliamentary passage, we're being bombarded with reminders about the events of 1992-1993, when the bill to ratify the Maastricht treaty provoked the most determined and vicious Conservative backbench revolt in the entire post-war era. But the comparison is spurious. I'm afraid anyone looking for something similar this time will be sorely disappointed.

It's one of the truisms of British politics that Europe is an issue that divides both the main political parties. It's one of the things that people say sagely, and at which other people nod knowingly. It certainly used to be true - Europe caused hellish problems for both major parties in the 1970s and then again for the Conservatives in the 1990s - but it's not true any more.

For sure, divisions remain in both parties, but they are just not on the same scale as before. The days when the issue split the PLP right down the middle - as it did in 1975 - are long gone. Last week the European communities (finance) bill passed through the Commons. It was the equivalent bill that John Major had to make a vote of confidence in 1994 in order to get it through, and which led to the "whipless wonders" losing the party whip. This time, during the entire bill's passage, just five Labour MPs rebelled. If there's anything that unites Labour MPs nowadays it's this: most of them find the subject of Europe boring. It's an issue that some of them know they should be interested in but which they just can't muster up much enthusiasm for. Maybe this is a terrible state of affairs, although given that it's one that I share, I find it difficult to be too condemnatory.

Today's votes are on the second reading of the bill, and (slightly more interestingly) on a reasoned amendment, which will argue that the bill shouldn't be given a second reading because there's not going to be a referendum on the issue. Expect Labour rebellions, but nothing major. The real action will occur during the bill's committee stage, when the more detailed issues of the bill will be debated, and then there will be a decent-sized rebellion of Labour MPs over the referendum issue then, but it won't be huge.

Whatever else it is, this won't be Labour's Maastricht for three reasons. First, there's the government's majority. John Major's government enjoyed - if that is the right word - a majority of just 21, with more than that number of his own MPs opposed to the policy. Brown's whips have a majority more than three times the size, and almost no (realistic) estimates put the scale of backbench opposition at that size.

Second, the nature of the opposition. Major's rebels were dedicated to defeating the treaty, and would stop at (almost) nothing to do it. They were willing to vote against any part of the bill in order to slow its passage down. They were willing to vote against various procedural motions - closure motions, the votes to take the debate beyond 10pm, and so on - meaning that the government could never plan the bill's passage. And they were willing to collude with the opposition, to make life as difficult as possible for their own government. By contrast, almost none of the tiny number of out-and-out Eurosceptics on Brown's benches would countenance similar behaviour this time.

The Labour whips will face their biggest problem on the issue of a referendum, where the Eurosceptics will make common cause with those who fear the electoral consequences of denying a referendum, but it'll be a focussed revolt, done and dusted in a day. It might be tight, and the government might need the support of the Liberal Democrats to win (just as John Major needed them in 1992 over the Maastricht bill's paving motion), but the government will win. And the whips will schedule that vote early on in the proceedings so that the heat is taken out of the rest of the issue.

The third difference is that in 1992-93 the Conservative government lost control of the parliamentary timetable, and the issue rumbled on for over a year. That won't happen this time. The government are going to allow plenty of debate - both in an attempt to take the sting out of the charge that they are railroading this through against public opposition, and also in the hope that the issue will show up Tory divisions - but it'll be carefully timetabled debate, controlled, with no chance that it'll screw up the rest of the year's business.

And yes, there will be Tory divisions too. Over the course of the whole bill I'd not be surprised if more Conservatives defy their whip than do Labour MPs - at least as a proportion of their party's MPs. But who cares? Go back 15 years, and there were more Labour rebels over Maastricht than there were Conservative ones, but no one noticed. It was the Conservatives that lost their reputation for unity, not Labour. No one cares about splits in the opposition party. This won't be Gordon Brown's Maastricht, but neither will it be David Cameron's.

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