David Cameron is coy about telling us what he wants from the other 27 members of the European Union. The latest issue of the Sunday Telegraph tries to fill the gap. It leads with a story under the headline “Four key demands to remain in the EU." When I saw that, I thought I knew what they were, for last Friday, in the imposing setting of the Locarno Room at the Foreign Office, someone at the very heart of the renegotiation process also listed four “baskets," as he called them. However, it turns out that the two four-part lists are not quite the same.
The Locarno room gathering of the “Club of Three” brought together leading officials, politicians, journalists and business leaders from the UK, France and Germany. As the meeting was held under the Chatham House rule (which means comments can be reported but not attributed) I am not allowed to identify the speaker, but 40 witnesses could verify that the following list comes from a VIHM (Very Important Horse’s Mouth). His “baskets” were:
Competitiveness. The Government wants to complete the single market by extending it fully to services, especially financial services, and make further progress on deregulation and free trade (including the TTIP negotiations with the US)
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Sovereignty. The Government wants more power for national parliaments, acting together, more subsidiarity, and to keep the UK out of any drift towards a federal EU government of the kind implied by the words “ever closer union.”
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Welfare. The government wants agreement that people should not be allowed to use the principle of free movement to abuse the benefits system in the countries they travel to.
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Flexibility. The Government wants a “multilayer” Europe, in which different countries can choose different destinations for their relationship with the EU, including acceptance that the EU is a multi-currency system. This requires rules (the phrase used was “architecture of the interface”) that would prevent members of the Eurozone ganging up to tell the nine non-eurozone countries what to do. (The VIHM prefers “multilayer” to “multispeed”, as the latter implies heading for the same destination as different speeds, while the former means that different countries can choose different destinations.)
The Telegraph’s list was not quite the same. It divided VIHM’s fourth “basket” into two; more importantly, it excluded anything about welfare and free movement. Maybe the Telegraph got this wrong: it would be a huge step to drop the right to welfare reform from the UK’s key demands. Alternatively, the paper’s story reflects a shift in Downing Street’s negotiating stance that VIHM either did not know or was not yet willing to share in the not-completely-private environs of the Locarno Room.
However, both lists stress the importance of sorting out the “ever closer union” problem. The UK wants an explicit recognition that this term, enshrined in every treaty since the Treaty of Rome almost 60 years ago, shall not be used to drive the EU towards a single, secretive, Europe-wide government that completely supplants the current nation states.
Now, I’m sure that the wider negotiations over the next few weeks will be fraught and complex. But on this particular point, there is a fairly straightforward solution. We need a form of words that makes three things clear: that the word “closer union” refers to a broad ambition to bring people, not governments, together; that decision-making needs to be transparent and not secretive; and that those decisions should be taken wherever possible at local or national level, not by the EU centrally.
Here is a form of words that expresses those ambitions: “…an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen."
If David Cameron thinks that this will do the trick, I have good news. He won’t have to fight very hard to achieve it. In fact, he won’t have to fight at all. For this is what the EU is currently committed to achieve. And I say that not because I have a peculiarly rose-tinted view of the EU, but because every EU state has formally agreed those very words. They form part of article 1 of the Lisbon Treaty. The dragon of a tyrannical United States of Europe does not need to be slayed. It is already dead.
