The TaxPayers' Alliance will look to use Tory referendum plans to trigger a public vote on Britain's membership of the EU if the Conservatives win the general election. Matthew Elliott, the chief executive and founder of the TaxPayers' Alliance, has told Total Politics in an exclusive interview that he wants the organisation to head-up a campaign for a referendum using Conservative plans for bottom-up policy-making.

He said: “The Conservatives are committed to a policy that if you get a million signatures in the UK you can trigger a referendum and I am now currently thinking which issues after the election would be big enough for us to organise a UK-wide referendum over.”

“The obvious one is people feel that they were denied a say on the EU as an issue. That is an issue that is still very much festering and I don’t think it is going away either. There is a feeling in the UK that people want a referendum, people want to decide whether our future is within the European Union or should we have a looser relationship with the EU. So this is an issue which I think will come back on the political agenda and which people feel they want a say over and which would be the obvious choice for the first referendum.”

Read more of the exclusive interview at 3pm