Hague: demanding a referendum on the Amsterdam Treaty

Hague delivers his referendum call

Hague Demands Referendum on Amsterdam

Mr Hague declared: "Amsterdam was a bad Treaty. Bad for Europe and bad for Britain. And Tony Blair signed up to it lock, stock and barrel."

The government's decision to sign up to the Social Chapter was strongly criticised. The Prime Minister, Mr Hague said, had surrendered the veto on employment policy and allowed a "massive extension" of the European Parliament.

Mr Hague also addressed the future of his party. He told the delegates that change was necessary: "We were seen as divided, greedy, self-absorbed. Whether we deserved it or not, we were seen as remote from the people we were elected to serve. Over the last few years we lost our special relationship with the people of Britain. We forfeited their trust."

It was essential, the Tory leader continued, that the lessons of the general election defeat be learned. "The days of disunity, factions and wings, groups within groups, parties within parties, cliques within cliques is over. It's finished. It's out," he insisted. "And as long as I am leader it will never come back."

William Hague makes clear his opposition to devolution

Mr Forsyth was speaking after a debate on devolution. A motion to stick to the Conservative policy of campaigning against a Scottish parliament with tax-varying powers was passed unanimously, despite some dissent from a handful of party members.

The pro-devolutionists or "devo-realists" had urged party members to recognise that it was "the will of the Scottish people" to have their own parliament. Failure to recognise this was partly to blame for the Tories' disastrous showing at the election, they said.

But Mr Forsyth told delegates: "We Conservatives and Unionists have always stood for what we believed in. If, in the wake of election defeat, we were now to stand supinely aside and nod through the most disastrous reversal of our constitutional stability since 1707, we would deserve to be relegated to a footnote in history."

Forsyth: vigorous opposition to devolution

In her opening speech, the chairman of the Scottish Conservatives, Annabel Goldie, gave a stern message to delegates saying that the party must change or face "extinction".

Tensions within the shattered party north of the border surfaced the day before the conference, as grassroots activists gathered for one of their most important meetings in years.

Factional fighting was fuelled by a newspaper report that some Conservatives north of the border were planning a breakaway party and have been "bankrolled" by the like-minded German Christian Democrats to do so.

This prompted a call from one right-winger, Lloyd Beat, the chairman of the Conservative Political Centre of Scotland, to crack down on dissidents, claiming they posed the same sort of problem to the Tory party that Militant posed to Labour in the 1980s.

The Scottish Secretary, Donald Dewar, hit back at Mr Hague's referendum call. "Amsterdam was an important series of negotiations out of which the British came rather well," he said. "We maintained all the important veto areas. There were only very minor adjustments to qualified majority voting."

Annabel Goldie, Chairman of the Scottish Conservatives, discusses the Perth Conference with BBC's Newsnight