For David Cameron, the best answer to the Europe question is a quick one
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Version 0 of 1. In politics, as in comedy and sex, timing is often everything. David Cameron has given himself until the end of 2017 to answer what the British call the European Question and Europe calls the British Question. That long deadline for a renegotiation followed by a referendum is the position that will be repeated when the Queen is conveyed to Westminster this week to read out the government’s programme. The smoke signals from Number 10 suggest that the prime minister would like to get it done much faster than that. The corporate world is lobbying for an accelerated timetable with warnings that a protracted period of uncertainty will create an investment blight as companies suspend decisions until they know whether the UK is staying within the EU or heading for the exit. The rest of Europe had rather hoped the question might go away, but now that a referendum is seen as inevitable it would suit most of the biggest players if the UK made its mind up sooner rather than later. There are a lot of elections in key European states coming up. Spanish and Polish ones later this year and a German election and a French presidential contest both in 2017. Those closely involved believe that the window for serious negotiations opens in the second half of this year and lasts only until the first half of next. “It has to be done before the Germans and French go into election mode,” says one senior figure at the heart of the planning. The hardline anti-Europeans on the Tory benches, their antennae twitching for signs that their leader is about to betray them, are already suspicious that he wants a quick timetable because he’s only looking to secure some modest concessions that they will condemn as merely cosmetic. But contrary to the impression their party often gives, not all Tories are obsessives about Europe and many care about their party’s unity. They know that the referendum is going to trigger the mother of all battles among Conservatives and that there may be a better prospect of containing the damage during it and cauterising the wounds afterwards by getting it over and done with. I strongly suspect David Cameron agrees. He will not publicly declare at this stage that he’d prefer a 2016 referendum because it is too early to say whether it is achievable and it would leave him looking like a chump if it does not prove viable. But this he knows. The later he leaves it, the more risk he takes that his backbenchers will have become querulous and his government will have descended into a midterm slump by the time the people are asked the question. Many believe his ideal would be to hold the plebiscite on the same day as the May elections next year. London will be voting for its mayor, Scotland for its parliament, Wales for its assembly. Coinciding the referendum with those elections ought to boost turnout in areas of the country that are above average in their enthusiasm for remaining within the EU. The people as a whole might be grateful if the referendum was sooner rather than later. We have just emerged from a general election that was officially six weeks in duration and effectively, since the parties started campaigning in January, more than four months. That felt numbingly long to a lot of people. With the yes and no campaign organisations already beginning to limber up, a late referendum holds out the prospect of the political class and the media being consumed by a subject that passionately engages a minority but is of only intermittent interest to the majority. One Number 10 official characterises the likely attitude of most of the public as “wake me up when it is time to make a decision”. If David Cameron were master of the timetable, I’m pretty sure he’d want to speed it up, but he’s not in complete control. One hurdle is to get a bill legislating for a referendum through parliament. That shouldn’t be a problem in the Commons, especially when three of the Labour leadership candidates have done a reverse ferret on Ed Miliband’s position and now declare that they are in favour of a referendum. The Lords, where the Conservatives are far short of a majority, might be trickier. Ministers are assuming that peers will abide by the Salisbury convention that says that their lordships ought not to block legislation that a government promised in its election manifesto. “But there are a lot of Lib Dems in there,” remarks one senior government figure and those Lib Dems are hopping mad with the Tories for cannabilising their MPs at the election. The devilling will be in the detail. It’s generally thought is that it is better for your side to be the one that asks for a yes. So the question on the ballot paper will invite voters to affirm that they want to stay in the European Union rather than ask whether they want to leave. An issue to watch out for is the franchise. Should UK citizens living in other EU countries be allowed to participate in the referendum? And should the same right be extended to citizens of other EU states who are living in the UK? It is estimated that there are more than 2 million people in each category. Since both groups can be presumed to be more likely to vote yes, they could make a big difference to the outcome. Which is why some pro-European voices are saying they should be included and anti-European voices are demanding their exclusion. The most crucial factor is the pace of the negotiations. By the prime minister’s own admission, his conversations with other leaders have so far only “scratched the surface”. His ambition is to get a timetable and framework agreed at the European Council at the end of June. Assuming that is achieved, what will follow will be incredibly complex, with a lot of different actors. This is too often forgotten in Britain. We are not talking about Churchill and Roosevelt settling the hash over cigars and cognac. There are 27 other governments, each with their own interests to protect, their own parliaments to answer to and their own electorates to think about. No one serious in the rest of Europe wants this country to self-expel itself, but many continental governments have only just started to think about what they might be prepared to concede to keep the UK aboard. Before the election, they had been looking at the opinion polls and thinking that the question might not even arise. Says one minister: “They weren’t ready to offer anything until they knew what they would be dealing with. The election result has concentrated minds. There has been a mood change in Brussels.” Even so, realists in the British government know that Europe has quite a lot else on its plate. If you only followed the British media, you might have thought the recent summit in Riga was all about the UK’s future in the EU. In fact, David Cameron’s talks with other leaders were on the margins of that meeting. Its main point was to discuss relations with ex-Soviet states at this time of crisis over Ukraine. Oh, and did I mention Greece? What happens there will hugely affect how much energy and diary time other leaders have to think about the UK. Speaking at the Riga summit, Mr Cameron made a statement of the fairly obvious when he suggested that his mission will not be easy. The negotiations will be punctuated by “lots of noise”, “rows”, “ups and downs” and “knockbacks”. Some took that as an admission, others as a warning. It might actually be a hope. When it comes to selling the results of the renegotiation to his party, and then to the British public in the referendum, perceptions of what he has achieved will be crucial. Some noise, by dramatising the process, may help him to persuade people that he has achieved something solid. Only, though, so long as it is actually brought to a successful conclusion. The prime minister will have to be good at making friends and winning minds in Europe, something he did not excel at in his first term. He can’t afford to be nobby no-mates now. Angela Merkel has often told him that she will do what she can to help keep the UK inside the EU, but the prime minister has to help himself by learning to do things “the European way”. He will only succeed by patient application to alliance-building. There’s some evidence that he has taken this to heart. Officials report that he’s “taking it very seriously, he’s very engaged, very hands on”. Tomorrow night, the prime minister will be laying on dinner at Chequers for Jean-Claude Juncker, the man he tried to block from being president of the commission. The commission will be a crucial player in the renegotiation, but ultimately success or failure will come down to relations with other heads of government. Visits to Berlin, Paris, Warsaw and Copenhagen are already in the diary. More stops around other European capitals will follow. David Cameron looks like a man in a hurry who is following the advice of the most famous line from Macbeth. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. |