Free Lunch: On Europe, mountains and molehills

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 12 Μαΐου 2015 - 11:31

What does he want?

Having won an outright majority in the House of Commons from UK voters, David Cameron now needs to pull off a second act of persuasion, this time with his European partners. Across Europe, many will this week be poring over his January 2013 Bloomberg speech. The prime minister has promised to secure reforms of Britain's relationship with the EU, and then hold a referendum on the country's continued membership by 2017. An FT editorial this morning urges Cameron to proceed with urgency.

It would indeed be good to get the disruption and uncertainty of negotiations and a referendum campaign over with as soon as possible. For disruption and uncertainty is the best scenario that can be hoped for from a policy that is based on a contradiction. On the one hand, the prime minister makes the sweeping claim that the EU "is not working" for Britain, thereby contradicting the conclusions of his own government's extraordinarily thorough review of the balance of competences between itself and the EU. The best summary of the review's thousands of pages is that the status quo works well for the UK.

On the other hand, therefore, the "reforms" that Cameron has committed himself to seeking are small fry. But what are they exactly? Although the prime minister has argued it is unwise to "lay all Britain's cards on the table at the outset", he will soon have to show his hand. And he has set out a number of concrete demands in comment articles in the FT in 2013 and in the Daily Telegraph last year, as well as the Bloomberg speech itself and his immigration speech last November. There is a lot less than meets the eye.

Put to one side the bad-faith complaint against interference with "our police forces and justice systems" by the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution and so can hardly be renegotiated with the EU. Put aside, too, the symbolic complaint against the "ever closer union" - Cameron's Bloomberg speech made clear his problem is with a greater union between Europe's states, not between its peoples, which is what the Treaty actually says.

That leaves four main goals. The first is lighter business regulation. On this it can be said: it's a battle Britain is already winning, witness the appointment of Dutchman Frans Timmermans as an anti-red tape commissioner and vice-president of the Commission. In addition, the EU has not turned Britain into a highly regulated economy as it is. And anyhow, fighting for lighter regulation sounds like a programme that EU membership should be used for, not a reason to hand it in. The same can be said for a second goal of more open trade with the rest of the world: Britain adds weight to the pro-trade balance of the scales in the EU.

Third, less centralised decision-making in Europe - in particular through paying greater heed to national parliaments and preventing the eurozone from passing rules biased against the single market for the whole EU. These sound like they are more realistically pursued through a continued political commitment than big institutional reform.

The final and most expansive goal involves limits to immigration. The most impressive fact about it is how modest Cameron's concrete demands actually are. For existing EU citizens, he has renounced any call for numerical caps, focusing just on delaying immigrants' access to welfare benefits and limiting it to bona fide workers. But most of what is being proposed can already be put in place under existing law, especially after a recent European court ruling, or through simple EU legislation not involving Treaty change. For any future admission of new members, too, Cameron carefully avoids asking for absolute caps on migration - he only suggests a delay to free movement by linking it to economic development levels or limiting the annual migration rate (but not the overall total). In any case, this is not a concession he needs to bargain for: since new admissions are subject to unanimity, it's in the UK's power to block them single-handedly.

The upshot of all this is a list of demands short on details but whatever details there are turn out to be either within the UK's power to enforce already or not require other EU members to concede a whole lot. Also, they indicate that a successful renegotiation will actually change very little on the ground within the UK - as it should be: if it ain't broke, why fix it? It is a list, in other words, designed to look more momentous, harder to achieve, and more easily touted as a triumph than it really is. It is almost as if the PM had a background in PR.