Michael Portillo: Cameron's EU referendum is an 'insincere ploy' The intervention, in an article for The Times, comes days after Lord Lawson, who served as chancellor under Baroness Thatcher, argued there was now a "clear" case for withdrawal, and the economic benefits would "substantially outweigh the costs." In his article, Mr Portillo expressed scepticism that Mr Cameron would secure an outright majority at the next general election in 2015. "They didn't win the last one and it is extremely rare for governing parties to improve their share of the vote, even when their opponents are as weakly led as Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now," he wrote. Mr Portillo - now a pundit and broadcaster - said the "disastrous" euro project had "created hardship, unemployment and division on a dangerous scale." "The default position of the political class is defeatism: the belief that Britain could not survive outside the union; and the political class assumes that the public shares its defeatism," he wrote. The UK is unhappy in the EU. We do not share its vision, partly because we are not visionary by temperament. We are not so easily convinced that the EU is a necessary response to the horrors of the Second World War because our experience of that war was different. We did not endure revolution, dictatorship or invasion. Other countries may look to institutions at the European level because they doubt the durability of national institutions that perished in that conflict. We do not, because ours survived.