This would hardly be a trivial referendum. Some background.
The UK was promised a referendum on the Lisbon treaty by the Labour party as part of their election platform. However Gordon ‘the Leper’ Brown reneged on this promise, gave no referendum and signed the treaty anyway.
Now Cameron is coming under pressure (from the success of UKIP and from his own backbenchers) to finally let the British people express their opinion of the treaty and of what the EU has become.
The choice will indeed be either IN or OUT of the EU’s repressive customs- and debt-union.
It’s already customs/debt/political union at this point. That’s what Germany keeps pushing the other member states for. I do not regard that as a reasonable demand.
I’d agree that Tory backbenchers are doing what they should by pressuring Cameron but I’m not sure I’d agree that UKIP is much of a factor. UKIP seems more like a single issue, circular firing squad than a credible political party.
I’m also not that confident that a referendum would change much. The last poll I saw (for The Times, I think) showed 48% for pulling out, 35% for staying in and the remainder as ‘not sure’.
Whilst that looks promising, I think the staying in figures would rise as pro-EU campaigners focussed heavily on the feat factor of losing trade and jobs.
There is also another issue which is always overlooked in this debate; there are a million UK citizens permanently resident in other EU countries. Not only are these people not included in many poll figures but I’d imagine that they’d vote massively in favor of staying in and their participation rate would be much higher than UK based citizens.
In the end, I think the UK is too far down the road with the EU to do much more than slow their integration.
Calling for referendums is essentially a tool whereby proponents of populist policies can beat up the powers that be. Not that that isn't a desirable thing to do sometimes.