WHEN I was Home Secretary pushing through legislation on anti-social behaviour, a repeated criticism from The Guardian's senior commentator, the late Hugo Young, was that I was a "populist" who listened (too much) to his Blackburn constituents.

I pleaded guilty to the latter charge of taking note of what my constituents thought and offered no mitigation. Instead, I invited my critics to try their luck living down the street from a disruptive, drug-dealing resident and then decide whether my legislation was necessary.

As to "populism", it would be an odd politician who did not seek public endorsement for his or her record. You cannot shift around with the wind, and you will not gain respect if you do. But if you've any sense, you do keep listening and talking to your constituents - especially on difficult issues of the day.

That's what I've sought to do on the issue of a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. The document is not, as some have claimed - a surrender of British sovereignty, and it will not alter the fundamental relationship between the UK and other Member States and the EU.

For that reason, I judged, and so did the government as a whole, that a referendum was not necessary. The Treaty did not involve decisions on the scale of whether we come out of the EU itself. And previous Treaties involving real substantive change in the EU and for the UK - like one in 1986 setting up the single market or the 1992 Maastricht Treaty establishing the euro and a common foreign and security policy - were dealt with by Parliament alone. Indeed, Michael Howard - and the rest of John Major's cabinet voted down a referendum proposal from his own side at the time of Maastricht.

In Blackburn, I do five walk-in surgeries a month. Though constituents are free to raise anything they want to, in practice almost every case is about a personal problem and how I can help. It's very rare - perhaps once every two or three months - for me to be lobbied on issues of the day.

So my surgeries don't provide much of a guide to what's on people's minds. But my open-air meetings do, and still more so do the chance encounters I have with people, not least in the pub before a game, or - typically at half time when we're losing and unhappiness about Rovers extends to unhappiness about life, and the government in general.

In these conversations two things have been apparent. First - and very serious - that people worry about the EU; on the whole, they don't want to leave it, but they do want to see that it's working in our interests.

Secondly, that the constitutional Treaty was on people's minds - on this I find that while I could easily satisfy particular questions on the text (with which I have had to become all too familiar) my specific answers were not alleviating the wider anxiety that something was about to be foisted on people.

Added to this, there was the point - again difficult to refute - that as we as a government had introduced referendums for a Parliament for Scotland, for the euro (if the government recommend it), for regional assemblies and local mayors, why not have a referendum on the new Treaty, even if it did not add up to much change in reality.

All of us in Government knew that if we changed our position on this we'd get headlines about u-turns and the rest. It's the price one has to pay for such an obvious reversal of policy. But it was the right thing to do; and the argument about what's in the document - and our red lines - will no longer be drowned out by calls for a referendum because the British people will have the final say if agreement can be reached between the EU's 25 member states this June.

And for all the heat around the document it in fact has a rather straight forward purpose - to make the EU more efficient and deliver better for the citizens including all of us in East Lancs.