Cameron ‘on his guard’ in the EU
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM – I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Prime Minister rattle through a post-summit statement as fast as David Cameron did today. Apparently there was a Eurostar he really didn’t want to miss. He said he’d “secured clear agreement” that any extra powers the European Union considers using to police member states’ fiscal policy would not apply to Britain.
He would “not support the transfer of powers from Westminster to Brussels” – and that went for any chance of Brussels getting a look at the UK budget before Parliament too. Very small fish these and his seasoned team of officials, mostly unchanged from the one that accompanied Gordon Brown to these occasions, knows that.
I asked him if the lion’s den was quite as bad as Eurosceptics had painted it, the scene of lost British sovereignty and all that, or as others have said a changed place since the EU was widened to 27.
His answer was it was kind of both. He said there were integrationists still around and you had to be “on your guard” but that broadening the EU had changed the balance in the room.
On the cuts and suspended spending announced today, I asked what he would say to people shocked to see a hospital plan shelved when they thought that might count as a protected “frontline service?”
He said tough decisions had to be made and in a later answer said people couldn’t just “blindfold” themselves to that. He said as he looked round the European Council table he saw “countries struggling to deal with big debt and deficits” (Gordon Brown presumably not to blame for all of those, but we didn’t get round to that).
The Prime Minister will be pleased that he’s got through his first one of these potential bear-traps unscathed but will know that won’t last. How Europe finally chooses to settle issues of policing fiscal policy in member countries could still throw up another problem, EU policy on financial institutions is, so to speak, a “banker” for bad blood.
There’s the EU budget, the CAP and any number of difficulties not yet in view. But underpinning it all now are a euro crisis, the aftermath of the banking crisis and poor growth. Future EU arguments are bound to be tougher still when money’s tight everywhere.