Tacitly, Britain’s Top Banker Makes Case for Staying in E.U.
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Britons may be divided on whether they should remain within the European Union, recent public opinion polls show, but many big players in business and finance appear to know their views — and they seem to want to stay in the bloc. On Wednesday, the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, gave a positive, if cautious, assessment of British membership in the union, on which Britons will vote in a referendum by the end of 2017. That came after a more full-throated endorsement of the bloc issued by the country’s main business lobby, the Confederation of British Industry. Speaking at the University of Oxford, Mr. Carney stressed that he was not giving an overall verdict on British membership, but on its implications for the bank. “Over all, European Union membership has increased the openness of the U.K. economy, facilitating dynamism, but also creating some monetary and financial stability challenges for the Bank of England to manage,” he said. “Thus far, we have been able to meet these challenges,” he added. Mr. Carney also said that Britain’s openness had made it vulnerable to shocks after the euro crisis and he argued that there should be “clear principles to safeguard the interests of non-euro member states,” including Britain, which kept the pound rather than adopting the European single currency. Aside from his status as a central bank governor, Mr. Carney, may prove to be influential player in the debate partly because, as a Canadian, he is a relative newcomer to Britain’s agonized internal debate about its place in Europe. Those campaigning for Britain to stay in the European Union often rely on the economic case for membership, and therefore hope that the voices of business and finance leaders could prove persuasive. On Wednesday, the Confederation of British Industry laid out its case for staying in a single market of 500 million people, and for being able to influence the bloc’s rules and standards. “Alternative arrangements to full membership either have serious downsides or are surrounded by huge uncertainty,” Britain’s main business group said. The industry group conceded that some of its members “recognize that there are disadvantages to E.U. membership,” and called for the regulatory burden on smaller businesses to be eased and for further measures to increase competitiveness in Europe. Still, it argued that membership in the bloc remained in the national interest. “For business, the benefits of full membership outweigh the disadvantages, but the European Union must work better,” said the confederation’s director general, John Cridland. Vote Leave, one of the groups campaigning for withdrawal from the union, rejected the business group’s argument. “The fundamental logic of the single market is not supported by most U.K. businesses,” it said in a statement. “We want to end the supremacy of European Union law and regain the ability to make our own trade deals. There is only one way to choose our future, and that is to Vote Leave in the European Union referendum.” Both sides of the argument have held campaign kickoffs in recent weeks, and, while big business appears more favorable to the “in” campaign, there are also some significant figures in the business world who want Britain to quit. They argue that outside the bloc, Britain could forge advantageous trade deals with other areas of the globe, and that, being tied to sluggish continental European economies is akin to being shackled to an economic corpse. Before the referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron plans to renegotiate key aspects of British membership of the European Union, changes that — if achieved — he hopes to use to persuade Britons to stay in. Under pressure from several European allies, including France, Mr. Cameron has promised to give more information next month on the type of legislative and other concessions he wants. But on Tuesday, Britain’s minister for Europe, David Lidington, suggested this would not amount to a detailed list. Mr. Lidington told reporters in London that his advice to Mr. Cameron was that the “last thing” he should do should be to publish “a detailed negotiating position” setting out “red lines.” That, he added, was “because a detailed negotiating position becomes seen either as an opening bid, from which you can of course be negotiated down, or it is seen by another group of people as an absolute minimum that you must get, and any retreat from that is a devastating reverse.” Progress in these negotiations will determine the timing of the referendum, Mr. Lidington added. “You could be looking at next summer, you could be looking at next autumn, if we are still in European negotiations this time next year, then you’re looking at 2017, sometime,” Mr. Lidington said. Opinion polls tend to show Britain narrowly in favor of remaining in the European Union, and a study this week by Natcen, a social research institute, said that younger and better educated voters tended to be more opposed to British withdrawal. |