A quote from Daniel Hannan MEP at his blog, 20 February 2008

I and a handful of MEPs [Members of the European Parliament] marked the passage of the [Lisbon] Bill by wearing tee-shirts with the word “referendum”. A group of UKIP members had an amusing variant on the theme. They wore bright yellow tops with a picture of a hen, and the caption Too chicken for a referendum?

You can imagine how this went down. Most MEPs, of course, are chicken. They supported referendums until it became clear that they would lose them. Then, overnight, they switched to making hilarious speeches about how each nation had the sovereign right to ratify in its own way. The last thing they want is to be physically reminded of what they had previously promised. We Euro-sceptics are their bad conscience, which is why they so often lose their tempers and resort to playground insults. (Today, the Speaker said that the parents of the pro-referendum MEPs would be ashamed of them. A few weeks ago, the Liberal and Socialist leaders called us Nazis).