Despite my best efforts in the European Parliament to embarrass the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, by pointing out to him that during the revolving six month Dutch presidency of the European Council there is a European Union (EU) referendum in his home country, no one seems to have noticed. This is not unusual as the UK political press are more interested in Boris’s hairstyle than they are in the events on the continent. However there is a referendum in the Netherlands tomorrow, 6th April, on the EU-Ukrainian agreement. In July of last year a new piece of legislation came into force in the Netherlands called the Advisory Referendum Act (ARA). In a country with no history of direct democracy the government probably felt confident that nobody would get over a third of a million verified, signed pieces of paper to trigger a national vote. However, a group of young bloggers at an organisation called GeenPeil took up the challenge and set about gaining signatures. My experience of political bloggers all over the world is that whilst many of them may be very clever, few have the practical skills to even boil an egg let alone embark on a logistical