Cold feet! – What have Pickles and Papandreou in common?

The answer to this riddle is that they have both concluded that Referendums can be inconvenient.

It’s all really quite confusing isn’t it. Asking the public to give a view should, of course, be a no-brainer – and the more important the issue, the less one might imagine this to be controversial. Yet the hapless Greek premier had to withdraw his plan to force the public to ‘back him or sack him’ and it led to EU Governments telling him that the question would have had to have been an even more destructive IN/OUT of the Eurozone. And our Communities & Local Government Secretary had to abandon plans for petition-triggered referendums in the Localism Bill. In effect, he has bowed to pressure from Councils equally afraid of the unpredictable results of local polls.