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Notes -
Remember when Cameron promised the referendum in 2013 he was in charge with a coalition. That gave groups an out-sized power. There absolutely were enough in the euro-sceptic camp to cause him problems with votes because he didn't even have a majority on his own. The conventional wisdom as shown below was primarily because of the euro-sceptics with SOME others because they feared UKIP would cost them seats. But the biggest concern was the euro-sceptic bloc. Without them he probably could have wrangled the rest, because it was the euro-sceptic wing which was feeding the fears of the others. Cameron did not want a referendum. He did so because of the pressure he was under driven primarily by the euro-sceptic power bloc which was able to muster first 60, then 80 MPs to defy the government in votes, then over a hundred demanding a referendum. He only had 306 MPs at this time so over 100 is definitely enough to force any issue. As they did when they rebelled and sided with Labour.
"For Clegg, the reason Cameron moved to a referendum commitment was to manage his divided party.19 Echoing Harold Wilson’s 1975 European Community plebiscite, rather than a conversion to the merits of direct democracy, Cameron needed a mechanism to control an issue that was destabilising his party.20 As early as October 2011 Cameron had ‘faced 22 rebellions on Europe, involving 60 Tory backbenchers’.21 However, the pressure ratcheted upwards later in October when 81 Conservative MPs voted for a referendum in defiance of a three line whip. Both Cameron and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, spoke forcefully against the motion in the House of Commons yet could not prevent a larger rebellion than anything seen during the Maastricht legislation in 1992.22 Political pressure from Conservative MPs continued to grow. In June 2012 John Barron MP collected over 100 signatures from Conservative colleagues asking Cameron to commit to a referendum after the 2015 general election.23 The PM publicly rejected this from Brussels which angered his critics and eroded his ‘authority over the party’.24 Pressure rose further in October 2012 when Conservative rebels united with Labour to defeat Cameron in Parliament over EU budget contributions."
"Cameron chose to commit to a vote, not because the country’s population was clamouring for one but because a significant minority of his own MPs, many of them frustrated by the constraints of coalition, were demanding that he do so – some because they feared that UKIP would cost them their seat (or the seats of too many of their colleagues) at the next election, some because they wanted out of the European Union and were more than happy to leverage that fear to their advantage."
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