Europe: Cameron Finally Gets His Deal

February 22, 2016, 12:15 PM GMT+0

It took a lot of hard-pounding but late on Friday night David Cameron finally secured a deal with his twenty-seven fellow European heads of government for a ‘new settlement’ between Britain and the European Union.

But is it the ‘fundamental and far-reaching reform’ he promised three years ago when he first announced that he wanted to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership and submit the outcome to a referendum? Not in the view of six members of his Cabinet and the London mayor, Boris Johnson. So will it be enough to secure him victory in that referendum?

Britain’s membership of the EU has been what the Prime Minister has called a ‘festering’ issue in Britain for decades. Although rarely high up on the list of political problems most exercising the British public, there has been a growing sense that more and more people felt it was time to be given a second chance to say whether or not Britain should remain in the EU rather than simply accept as settling things forever the decision taken in the first referendum over forty years ago, when the public voted two-to-one to stay in.

That’s partly because ‘Europe’ has changed so much in the meantime. Back in 1975, the European Economic Community was essentially (or was at least claimed to be) simply a ‘common market’ of nine countries trading with each other and engaging in other purely economic activities together. Today it is the European Union, an increasingly politically-integrated union of twenty-eight countries most of whom have given up their own currencies in order to use a common currency, the euro. Some see this increased political integration as incomplete and regard the current EU as the embryo of a United States of Europe.Within David Cameron’s Conservative Party the issue of Britain’s membership of the EU has long been much higher up the political agenda. Indeed what has been called the Tories’ ‘obsessing’ about Europe was said by many to be partly responsible for keeping the party out of power for so long after 1997. It had become ‘neuralgic’ for the party.

And then UKIP exploded onto the political scene: a party explicitly committed to taking Britain out of the EU. It made serious inroads into the Tory vote and David Cameron decided the issue had to be faced. So back in January 2013, in a speech at Bloomberg’s headquarters in London, he announced that if his Conservative Party were re-elected with a majority of its own at the 2015 election, he would seek ‘fundamental and far-reaching reform’ of the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU and put the outcome to an in/out referendum by the end of 2017.

This is where we are now. The Prime Minister insists that he has secured a ‘special status’ for the UK within the EU and that as a result of his success in Brussels he will now campaign ‘heart and soul’ for Britain to remain in the EU.

But his critics, including his close ally, the Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, and Boris Johnson, probably Britain’s most popular politician, argue that what he has secured is anything but the ‘fundamental and far-reaching reform’ he promised. In the early months of his negotiations he kept his cards very close to his chest so that it was not at all clear what exactly it was that he was after. Some suspected that rather than laying out his demands and then fighting for them, he went about it all the other way round: he fished around to discover what he had any hope of achieving and then declared that that was what he had been after all along.

When eventually he articulated the four things he was pursuing it seemed to many to confirm the lack of ambition of which his critics accused him. They included a renewed commitment to make the EU more economically competitive (something EU leaders have banged on about for decades without delivering). He also wanted British exemption from the EU goal of ‘ever closer union’, something his critics said Britain already enjoyed through its non-adoption of the euro and other integrationist measures, such as the Schengen agreement on open borders. He demanded safeguards for non-eurozone countries, such as the UK, against being outvoted on key issues by the eurozone acting as a bloc. But perhaps most surprisingly he placed a great deal of emphasis on wanting curbs on welfare payments paid to foreign EU nationals working in Britain.

What was surprising about this was that the issue had not figured at all in his original Bloomberg speech. It seemed a response to increasing alarm in the interim at the very large numbers of EU nationals coming to work in Britain, and doing so in accordance with the fundamental EU principle of the free movement of people and labour within the EU. These numbers had driven a coach and horses through the government’s declared intention of reducing net immigration into Britain into the tens of thousands. Unable to challenge the principle without leaving the EU altogether, Mr Cameron sought to curb the ability of such EU workers to claim unemployment benefit, in-work benefits and the sending of child benefit remittances back to their children still living in the workers’ original EU country. That there is little evidence that such benefits (as distinct from the ready availability of work in Britain) are drawing EU workers to this country did not deter the Prime Minister. He argued that restricting such benefits until workers had first contributed to the system was fairer.

Even if this is true it seems (to his critics) irrelevant to the issue of fundamental reform that he had promised. They point out that he has failed entirely to repatriate any powers from Brussels to London, that he has done next to nothing to increase the powers of the UK parliament over EU institutions and that the treaty change he said was essential is merely promised rather than nailed down.

Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, dismissed the outcome of the negotiations as ‘truly pathetic’. Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP who wants Britain out of the EU, scoffed that Britain had banged the table and aggressively demanded the status quo. And Nigel Lawson, the former Tory chancellor and chairman of one of the campaigns to take Britain out of the EU, said the changes the Prime Minister had secured ‘range from the wholly inadequate to the completely meaningless’.

Mr Cameron will have expected such brickbats from those who would have wanted Britain to quit the EU whatever deal he had managed to strike. He will have taken greater comfort in the judgement of his former attorney-general, Dominic Grieve, who described the explicit exemption of Britain from ever-closer union as the most significant development in Britain’s relationship with the EU in all our years of membership. And he will note the verdict of the independent think-tank, Open Europe, which campaigns for reform throughout the EU and which said of his deal that it ‘is not transformative, but neither is it trivial’, specifically saying that the agreed safeguards against the eurozone dictating terms to the UK are ‘significant’. It added, however, that whilst Mr Cameron had got a new deal for Britain he had achieved no broader reform of the EU as a whole.

Mr Cameron may be hoping that as the referendum campaign gets going the details of his renegotiations will fade to the margins and the focus of the argument will be on the fundamentals of whether or not it is in Britain’s interests to remain in the EU. This is already happening. Mr Cameron himself, in a Sunday interview, focused on the broader issue of Britain (in his view) being ‘better, safer and stronger’ in the EU, while Mr Johnson argued that the EU had become a political project in ‘real danger of getting out of proper political control’.

It’s these broader themes we’re going to be talking about over the next four months. Nonetheless, while the outcome of his negotiations is still fresh in our minds it is worth asking the question: has Mr Cameron secured enough change in our relationship with the EU to persuade us to go on being part of it? Or had you already made up your mind even before Mr Cameron arrived in Brussels last week?

Let us know.