HOW CAMERON BLEW HIS BIG CHANCE
AT PRESENT, opinion polls are evenly balanced on whether Britain should leave the EU.
But as soon as you throw in a third option — a looser deal, where we are in the common market but outside the common political structures — approval for staying in Europe shoots up to 70 per cent or more.
Which is why David Cameron decided to precede the referendum with a renegotiation, aimed at establishing some new status for us along those lines. That renegotiation process demonstrated just one thing — how intractable the EU is and how disdainful its leaders are toward Britain’s wishes.
In many minds, there were three core aims of a renegotiation.
The primacy of UK over EU law on our own territory.
The right to sign bilateral trade deals with non-EU states, such as Australia and India.
The right to control who can settle in the United Kingdom.
None of these is in any sense immoderate or unreasonable. That they cannot be reconciled with EU membership tells us a great deal about the nature of the EU.
Cameron bottled it from the start. Initially, he set out a broad but shallow reform package. It was pretty modest — docile even — but these demands didn’t even get past the exploratory talks stage. Before they were even properly discussed, out went:
Restoring social and employment legislation to national control.
A complete opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Limiting the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over criminal law.
EU jobseekers to have a job offer before they come here.
EU jobseekers to leave if they haven’t found work in six months.
Revising the Working Time Directive (to give the National Health Service more flexibility).
Ending European Parliament sitting in Strasbourg as well as Brussels. Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Treaty change before the referendum. This last point is critical. Without a new treaty, as all sides were aware, there would be no binding changes. Yet Brussels had no intention of committing to a new treaty. The old rules — the ones we wanted to change — would still apply.
Britain was reduced to getting a declaration from the other heads of government to the effect that a few things might be looked at or reconsidered. That was it.
Cameron went into actual talks with just four remaining objectives — boosting competitiveness; protecting the position of non-euro states; strengthening national parliaments; and limiting migration.
The first two aims were never intended to be anything other than declaratory: ‘more
competitiveness’ is a meaningless platitude as is ‘protecting the status of non-euro states’. It amounted to a declaration that Britain wouldn’t have to join the single currency — something we had no intention of doing anyway.
As to the third commitment, the strengthening of national parliaments, all that has been conceded is a ‘red card’ proposal, which gives the national parliaments of the EU a theoretical right to block a Commission proposal if 55 per cent of them simultaneously demand it.
The right is, however, wholly notional. An existing ‘yellow card’ mechanism, which needs only 35 per cent of parliaments to be triggered, not 55 per cent, has been used only twice during the six years of its existence — and on one of those occasions it was ignored. But the ‘red card’ measure isn’t just useless; it is actively harmful. For the first time in its 750-year history, Parliament in Britain is formally recognised as a sub- unit within a larger polity.
This initiative treats the EU’s national parliaments like state legislatures in the U.S. — which are empowered to make constitutional amendments if they club together in the right proportion.
Instead of being a sovereign entity, our Parliament implicitly accepts a subordinate status. And all in exchange for a blocking power that will never, in fact, be exercised.
Which leaves the fourth objective, the idea of restricting migration from the EU. What the PM originally wanted was an ‘emergency brake’ on migration, to limit the number of people who could settle in Britain from EU states. But Eurocrats told him that was no go.
So, instead, he said he’d ban foreign nationals from claiming benefits for four years. People, the argument went, should put something into the pot before they can draw payments from it. Again, the Eurocrats said no.
Britain’s surrender in those renegotiations was nothing short of abject. Having gone in with paltry and unassuming demands, the leader of the EU’s second-largest net contributor failed to get even those.
Our Prime Minister was forced to come back to his national parliament with what the Italians call ‘fried air’ — nothing at all.
If this is how they treat us now, when we might walk away and take our budget contributions with us, how would they treat us the day after we had voted to remain?