Risk
of EU breakup is real, Tusk warns ahead of crucial summit
European
council president says positions hardening on Britain’s future in
Europe and warns ‘what is broken cannot be mended’
Ian Traynor and
Nicholas Watt
Monday 15 February
2016 20.09 GMT
Donald Tusk, the
president of the European council, warned on Monday that positions
were hardening on Britain’s future in Europe ahead of the crucial
summit he will chair on Thursday and the risk of break-up was real.
David Cameron
scrapped a debate at the European parliament on Tuesday and scheduled
a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European
commission, amid fears that a proposed settlement geared to keeping
the UK in the EU could unravel because of growing European objections
to the concessions promised to Britain.
“This is a
critical moment,” Tusk warned. “It is high time we started
listening to each other’s arguments more than to our own. It is
natural in negotiations that positions harden, as we get closer to
crunch time. But the risk of break-up is real because this process is
indeed very fragile. Handle with care. What is broken cannot be
mended.”
The stark warning
from the former Polish prime minister, who presides over the EU
summit on Thursday and who has been charged with drafting the
settlement rewriting the terms of Britain’s EU membership, came as
east European leaders staged a mini-summit in Prague to hammer out a
common position on the proposed British deal.
Bohuslav Sobotka,
the Czech prime minister, who chaired the meeting of four central
European countries – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic – said they had agreed a position but that he would not
divulge it before informing Tusk.
Tusk is expected in
Prague on Tuesday. “We will all have to decide together, and where
we cannot and will not compromise on the fundamental freedoms and
values,” Tusk said.
Cutting welfare
benefits for east European workers in western Europe is the main
sticking point threatening to wreck a putative deal negotiated since
last July and fine-tuned over the past fortnight.
Cameron’s central
demands of freezing in-work benefits for four years for EU migrant
workers in the UK and cutting child benefits for the same workers who
leave their offspring at home have already been watered down in the
draft agreement but remain unacceptable for the east Europeans.
They will accept the
curbs, but only if they are limited to Britain and are not applied
across the EU. This applies in particular to child benefits, which,
at the moment, are not to be scrapped but indexed to east European
levels.
The central European
quartet will accept that for the sake of a deal with Cameron but do
not want the UK special treatment broadened to apply uniformly across
the EU. They also fear eventual knock-on effects in other areas of
national social security systems in Europe.
It emerged that this
is the key stumbling block for Cameron at the summit, although there
are ample other issues still to be resolved.
“Indexation of
child benefit will be at the core of the discussions” with Cameron
on Tuesday, Juncker said.
The prime minister
is likely to come under pressure to relinquish his child benefits
gains for the sake of a deal on Thursday. To do so would invite howls
of protest from dissidents within the Conservative party.
Cameron also agreed
on Monday to hold an emergency cabinet meeting on Friday if he
secures a summit deal, raising the prospect that a four month
referendum campaign could be under way within days.
The move will be
seen as a concession to Eurosceptic ministers who had feared they
would be unable to speak out while the prime minister uses the
weekend to campaign in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU.
Cameron is due to
make an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 on Sunday morning
to spell out his case to keep Britain in a reformed EU in a
referendum he hopes to hold on 23 June. The anti-EU Grassroots Out
group will hold a rally in Westminster on Friday afternoon.
The prime minister
would use the cabinet meeting, which would have to take place late on
Friday afternoon after the formal conclusion of the European council
in Brussels, to trigger the formal lifting of collective cabinet
responsibility. This would mean that ministers who want to campaign
for a UK exit from the EU would be free to reject the EU deal. Iain
Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, is expected to lead a
list of around five cabinet ministers who will campaign for a Brexit.
He is expected to be joined by Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland
secretary; John Whittingdale, the culture secretary; Chris Grayling,
the leader of theCommons; and Priti Patel, who attends the cabinet as
employment minister.
Cameron has made
clear that he will impose some restrictions on cabinet ministers who
want Britain to leave the EU. They will be expected not to campaign
in an aggressive way and he will take a less tolerant view of anti-EU
campaigners who have little or no track record of Euroscepticism.
Tensions in the Tory
party over Europe burst into the open when Sir Nicholas Soames, the
former defence minister, told the Eurosceptic former leadership
contender John Redwood to “bugger off”. Soames tweeted his
disapproval after Redwood advised Tory MPs who won selection contests
after telling local association they were Eurosceptic to be true to
their vote and to vote to leave the EU. Soames tweeted: “I must say
to be told how to vote in referendum by J Redwood in an email to
colleagues marks a new low in my life in the house #buggeroff.”
The prime minister
will head to Brussels for a meeting on Tuesday morning with the
president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, and the MEPs
delegated by the parliament as “sherpas” for the negotiations.
They are Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister who is
leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, Elmar
Brok, a leading member of Angela Merkel’s CDU party, and Roberto
Gaultieri, of the Socialists.
In a change of plan,
the prime minister will not meet the “conference of the presidents”
– the leaders of all eight pan-European groupings in the
parliament. Cameron will instead just meet the leaders of the two
largest groupings in the European parliament: Manfred Weber, the
chairman of the European People’s party, and Gianni Pittella,
chairman of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
The change of plan
means that the prime minister will not meet Nigel Farage, who is the
joint president of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group.
Downing Street felt that it would be a better use of the prime
minister’s time to meet the leaders of the main groupings and not
provide a platform for the likes of Farage to take potshots at him.
The prime minister
needs to win over the leaders of the main groupings to persuade them
not to veto any package of reforms agreed by national leaders.
Downing Street has said that the government is seeking to secure an
agreement that will be “legally binding” on the EU’s 28
leaders.
But EU leaders have
no ability to bind the European parliament, which could block the
secondary legislation that will be needed to restrict in-work
benefits to EU migrants and to ensure that child benefit is paid at
the rate of an EU migrant’s home country. Downing Street believes
that a declaration by EU leaders, plus supportive statements from the
main leaders in the European parliament, will make it difficult to
unstitch a deal.
The Vote Leave
campaign group said that the decisive role of the European Parliament
– plus the government’s acknowledgment that it will not secure a
revision of the Lisbon treaty before the referendum – means that
the deal would amount to no more than an unsigned contract. The
government wants to secure a legally binding agreement that would be
attached to the next EU treaty in the way that a series of
concessions to Denmark, following its initial rejection of the
Maastricht treaty, were grouped together in a special protocol.
In a report, Vote
Leave concludes: “The only way to obtain ‘legally binding and
irreversible’ change to the UK’s relationship with the EU is to
Vote Leave.”
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