Brussels
Sketch
David
Cameron is his own worst enemy in EU talks
His
claim of Britain getting special treatment could hurt chances of
winning backing for reform.
By TIM KING
2/4/16, 5:30 AM CET
David Cameron has
been negotiating on the international stage since 2010, but its
niceties still escape him. On Tuesday, after Donald Tusk had
published the outline of what he calculated could be agreed by the
European Council to keep the U.K. in the EU, Cameron contrived to
make the deal harder to achieve.
On the face of it,
Cameron was welcoming the draft deal, announcing that “strong,
determined patient negotiation has achieved a good outcome for
Britain.”
He added: “Sometimes
people say to me, ‘If you weren’t in the European Union, would
you opt to join the European Union?’ And today I can give a very
clear answer: if I could get these terms for British membership, I
sure would opt in to be a member of the European Union because these
are good terms — and they are different to what other countries
have.”
In that one,
protracted sentence, Cameron perfectly illustrated why he is so
frustrating to those in Brussels who want to see the United Kingdom
remain part of the EU.
On the one hand, he
made a step away from mind-befuddling talk of emergency brakes and
red cards and protocols: He posed and answered in the affirmative the
question, “Should the U.K. be part of the EU on these terms?”
Yet with his very
next breath he undid what he had just said by adding, wholly
unnecessarily, “and they are different to what other countries
have.”
That additional
claim suggests Cameron isn’t remotely ready for the game of
three-dimensional chess that he is supposed to be playing.
Everybody’s equal?
Equal treatment is a
crucial element in the current negotiations. The complexities about
the emergency brake and the red card are necessary precisely because
both Tusk and the European Commission have to maintain that they are
introducing general principles available to each state.
That’s why
Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president, told MEPs that the
proposed deal was “fair for the U.K. and fair for the other 27
member states.”
“Cameron
seems to be laboring under the illusion that when he is in Britain he
is protected by some kind of reflective mirror that means he can be
seen only by those inside the country.”
By claiming special
treatment, Cameron reduces his chances of winning the consent of the
Central and East European states to Tusk’s proposals. Their
citizens have watched successive governments labor to comply with the
acquis — the accumulated body of EU law — and have repeatedly
been told that EU membership is afforded to each member state on
equal terms. Cameron’s counterparts around the Council table are
entitled to demand equal terms and to deny Britain special treatment.
So if Cameron has got special terms, he shouldn’t admit that to
anyone outside the U.K..
Unfortunately,
Cameron seems to be laboring under the illusion that when he is in
Britain he is protected by some kind of reflective mirror that means
he can be seen only by those inside the country. Although he used to
be a spin doctor for an international media company (Carlton
Television), he may not have realized that the English language and
television are widely used beyond the U.K.’s borders.
Even if Cameron’s
EU counterparts pretend not to have noticed, his claim that “what
we have is different to what other countries have” may also prove
corrosive to the prime minister’s cause inside Britain. In his own
Conservative Party, Cameron is besieged by Euroskeptics who want the
U.K. to take back more powers from Brussels. Defending himself
against the charge that he should have got more significant
concessions, Europe Minister David Lidington said that Britain is
involved in an international negotiation. There are, he implied,
constraints.
“The
moment Cameron claims that exclusive special terms are available, he
leaves himself vulnerable to questions about why he didn’t obtain
something stronger.”
Now, while many of
Cameron’s opponents are ideologically driven (e.g., ex-ministers
Peter Lilley and John Redwood) and others have well-developed
intellectual powers of self-deception (Boris Johnson), there are at
least some who would recognize that, in seeking a revised EU
settlement, Cameron did not have a free hand.
But the moment
Cameron claims that exclusive special terms are available, he leaves
himself vulnerable to questions about why he didn’t obtain
something stronger.
Up to now, Cameron
has been reluctant to take on the doubters. That rhetorical question
— “would we sign up on these terms if we weren’t already in?”
— is at least a respectable question, even if his answer still
needs a lot of work. But he still seems loath to move away from the
limited territory of the four-point negotiation (emergency brake and
all) and to debate the true merits and demerits of EU membership.
Referendum message
on track
Cameron’s spin
doctors decided that he should deliver his first response to Tusk’s
proposals away from Westminster. So the London press pack was shipped
off to the market town of Chippenham, 100 miles west of London, to
listen to Cameron speak at a Siemens factory. The message, lest you
missed it, is that there are British jobs bound up with European
companies such as Siemens.
There was a time
when Chippenham did not depend on German investment for its
engineering prowess. This year the town will mark the 175th
anniversary of the opening of its railway station as part of the
Great Western Railway. Both the station and the railway line were
designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a hero of British engineering
(albeit the son of a Frenchman).
Nowadays, Siemens’
premises in Chippenham have 700 staff who work for the division
Siemens Rail Automation, which provides signal and train control
systems for Britain’s railways. By an unhappy coincidence, because
of signaling problems some trains between London and Bristol were
diverted yesterday so as not to go through Chippenham — to the
distress of some of those journalists visiting from London. After
years of under-investment in the railways, there is plenty of
potential business for Siemens.
Although a happy
marriage between crumbling British infrastructure and German industry
is most unlikely to win Cameron approval for Britain’s continued
membership of the EU, that should not prevent him from explaining how
British citizens and British companies benefit from their membership
of the EU.
His arguments would
be on firmer ground if they acknowledged that EU membership is
supposed to be of mutual benefit to people across the entire EU. To
argue that Britain has special, discriminatory benefits is both
short-sighted and self-defeating.
Tim King writes
POLITICO’s Brussels Sketch column.
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