How our PM gave in to Merkel’s demands over EU
AS REVELATIONS go, Iain Duncan Smith’s disclosure that the Prime Minister bowed to Angela Merkel’s demand to drop his so-called EU membership renegotiation “red line” is pretty explosive.
That “red line” was an emergency brake on immigration – so that we could call a halt, at least for a time, to the unrelenting increase that we have seen in recent years.
It should have been a pretty fundamental component of any renegotiation. But although it was widely trailed that this would form the core of the Government’s renegotiation requirements, all talk of it vanished when David Cameron finally revealed his demands in a speech in November 2014.
At the time there were a number of Tory MPs who expressed their anger. They knew that without such a plan to halt immigration, even for a while, any renegotiation, however well meant, was fundamentally pointless.
Now we know for certain that the renegotiation was not even well meant. It was a sham from the start.
At the time it was widely reported that the disappearance of the “emergency brake” from the British demands was because Mr Cameron had bowed to German pressure.
That was vigorously denied – as if that could possibly have happened!
BUT now for the first time an insider has spoken. As a Cabinet minister at the time Iain Duncan Smith is able to recount what happened with total authority. And he has revealed that the allegations of Germany being the final arbiter of what we were allowed to say, or even ask for, were true.
As he puts it: “It’s like they were sitting in a room, even when they were not there. There was a spare chair for them – called the German chair. They have had a de facto veto over everything.”
According to Mr Duncan Smith, at the very last minute David Cameron bowed to Germany’s demand that he dump his long-promised “red line” for an emergency brake to stop any new influx of migrants.
In his account, he says that Mr Cameron’s speech on November 27, 2014, in which he