The Economist
IT TELLS you a lot about David Cameron’s dinner in London last night with Donald Tusk that the press could not subsequently decide whether it was a coup or a disaster for the prime minister and his plan to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership. On the one hand the European Council president bluntly commented “no deal” as he swept out. His team confirmed that it would not be circulating a proposal today—and possibly not tomorrow either, if remaining differences cannot be ironed out. On the other hand Downing Street was upbeat, describing as a “significant breakthrough” the news that “the Commission have tabled a text making clear that the UK’s current circumstances meet the criteria for triggering the emergency brake” (a four-year benefits freeze for incomers).
Ongoing disagreements concern Britain’s demands for protections for non-eurozone EU members (France is unhappy at what it sees as an attempt to secure preferential treatment for the City of London) and rules governing spousal visas for immigrants. But the main sticking point remains the emergency brake; specifically for how long it should apply. On Friday, after a meeting in Brussels with Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, Mr Cameron dismissed a proposal for a two-year brake with a possible two-year renewal (an option apparently too obviously designed to stifle British opposition to the EU until the referendum is safely won). Now the prime minister is reportedly pushing for a seven-year brake, one that would outlast his premiership and dump the question of its renewal—almost certainly in the power of the European Council or Commission—onto his successor.
Treat much of this with caution. Leaks and statements from both London and Brussels are part megaphone-negotiation (each side warning the other not to push too hard) and part shadow-boxing designed to give an exaggerated impression of the struggle between the two sides—the better for Mr Cameron to sell a final deal to his MPs and voters and for Mr Tusk to persuade the EU’s other 27 governments to wave through an agreement at the summit on February 18th and 19th. That latter process may prove trickier than the initial deal between London and Brussels. Central European governments are wary of creating a precedent whereby their nationals in Western Europe are treated as second-class workers (situating the power to hit the brake in Brussels, rather than in national capitals, may help on that), while governments in Austria, Sweden, Denmark and even Germany are threatened by populist parties pushing hard for local versions of Mr Cameron’s renegotiation. Mr Cameron’s demands, it must be conceded, are not ground-breaking and do not amount to the drastic reshaping of Britain’s EU membership that he declared necessary in his Bloomberg speech in 2013, in which he first committed to an in-out referendum. Tightening migrant benefits is the most contentious of his four “baskets” of demands. The others are protections for euro-outs (which goes with the grain of existing shifts in Brussels), an anti-red tape drive (ditto) and an end to the mantra of ever-closer union (effectively killed off at a Council summit in 2014, which concluded that “the concept of ever-closer union allows for different paths of integration… while respecting the wishes of those who do not wish to deepen any further”).
Yet none of this need be fatal for the referendum. Despite the rhetoric, the renegotiation was only ever going to be a symbolic exercise; a illustration of Britain’s ability to influence the agenda in Brussels and an acknowledgement of swing voters’ concerns, however inaccurately or impartially they reflect the reality.
