David Cameron’s shopping list for Brussels
Reading David Cameron in The Times today you get a flavour of his Brussels shopping list. He is clearly trying to signal to his troops that he won’t roll over when they ask him to sign up to Treaty changes that enforce a sort of “S & M” version of the stability and growth pact.
But I think there are 3 key phrases that jump out at you from the article:
“What matters most to Britain’s national interests now is that the eurozone sorts out its problems”.
You bet! And not just to Britain’s national interests. Imagine the scene: it is midnight in Brussels on Thursday night. Word reaches Washington that the entire euro deal is hanging in the balance because David Cameron is wielding his veto until he gets some asymmetrical guarantee that protects the City of London. David Cameron could expect a rocket from President Obama that would put the big bazooka to shame.
It’s not going to happen. So David Cameron is going to ask for stuff he thinks he can get. Here’s the second quote:
“It is … important that there are rules to keep the single market fair and open for key industries for Britain, including financial services.”
It looks to me that what he’s talking about there is that he doesn’t want the 17 eurozone countries to start setting up a single market within the single market, with its own rules on, say, how insurance companies should operate. If they did, those extra rules for the 17 would effectively act as trade barriers to British financial services companies wanting to operate within the eurozone.
David Cameron has European Commission backing for this – President Barosso is determined to keep the single market operating at the level of the 27 EU members. I mentioned yesterday that David Cameron will also be asking for some transparency about eurozone meetings so the “outs” don’t get paranoid about gatherings that will become monthly and with their own secretariat.
And then there’s this quote:
“…the problem with the eurozone is a problem of competitiveness, with countries that have large trade deficits coexisting with Germany, which has a huge trade surplus.”
How, you might wonder, is that precise problem addressed in what we know about the Sarkozy/Merkel/Rompuy plans circulating? Will a German prescribed crash economic diet for the more indebted countries really do the trick?
As for Brussels, I understand that the Article 12 “quickie” approach to the eurozone deal is not really a runner … quite a few governments feel that they can’t run rough-shod over their own national ratificiation procedures. So the success of Brussels, on its own terms, will depend on the shopping lists other countries bring with them – how feasible, affordable, reasonable they are.
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