Cameron’s failure means he should campaign to quit
IF IT wasn’t already plainly obvious that EU officials and the leaders of other member states have no intention of ceding an inch to British demands for negotiation it will become so this week.
Even the proposals agreed between David Cameron and Donald Tusk last month have begun to fall apart already as the European Parliament president Martin Schulz warns that MEPs might choose to vote against the proposals.
In the three years since Cameron announced that we would have a renegotiation followed by an in- out referendum it has become increasingly clear that he saw the whole exercise as a form of party management.
He wanted to silence Conservative Eurosceptics for the duration of his time in office. Thus he dangled before them the chance of a genuine change in Britain’s position within the EU.
But why, if he was serious about renegotiation, would he have started campaigning for an “in” vote before he had even cut a deal with president of the European Council Donald Tusk?
The prospect of his using his considerable influence as Prime Minister in campaigning for Brexit should have been his most powerful negotiating weapon. Instead he tossed it away before the battle had even begun.
DONALD TUSK responded by throwing David Cameron a few token offerings. His draft agreement doesn’t even remove the words “ever closer union” from the EU’s founding treaty but adds the meaningless phrase that this should not be taken to mean that all EU states are headed “for a common desti nation”.
As for the “emergency brake” on migrant benefits it is far from clear in what circumstances this could be exercised, who would have to agree before it could be exercised and how long it would last.
But even these lean offerings, it turns out, might not actually materialise. They may be flattened at this week’s summit or they may be voted down by the European Parliament.
What happened to the other things that David Cameron has promised to reform within the