Boris Johnson once joked that as Brussels correspondent at the Telegraph, he needed just one intro: “Britain stood alone last night as…”
That’s the audience for David Cameron’s “renegotiation” of Britain’s membership of the European Union. The Prime Minister wants to secure enough concessions – frankly, any concessions – that he can parade around as a new deal, before securing a “Remain” vote in the coming In-Out referendum.
With Harold Wilson, it was tariffs on butter from Commonwealth countries. Today, Donald Tusk, the President of the European Commission, has published the draft agreement – and, just as with Wilson before him, Cameron has declared it a big victory, saying he would vote to stay In if he secured these terms. Is he right?
Well, sort of. He’s more than met the “five tests” George Osborne set for Britain’s renegotiation of its relationship with the European Union, mostly within the frame of the least contentious part of Tusk’s proposal, that on economic governance.
But as I wrote at the time, the five tests were the mirror-image of Gordon Brown’s five tests for British membership of the Euro – tests that could, in theory, be met at any time, but were never going to be met. These are tests that could, in theory, be failed – but never were in serious prospect of doing so. Osborne and Cameron are marking their homework – and, surprise surprise, they’ve given themselves full marks.
What have they actually got? A so-called “red card” providing more power for national Parliaments in treaty change, a recognition, effectively, of a “two-speed Europe” of the Eurozone countries and the rest (there’s an irony that the situation feared by Eurosceptics in the 1990s has come to the rescue of David Cameron in 2016), and a British opt-out on “ever-closer union”. The idea of ever-closer union has, in any case, taken something of a knock-back due to the ongoing refugee crisis and may never recover, but still, in terms of the limited objectives set by Cameron, it’s a more meaningful set of compromises than that secured by Wilson.
There’ s just one problem: the “emergency brake” or the withdrawal of benefits from migrants in the EU area. In several crucial areas, Cameron has got less than he wanted – migrants will still be able to claim child benefit even if their children haven’t made the journey to the UK. Instead of a straight restriction of the right to claim benefits until EU migrants have been working in Britain for four years, claims will instead be “graduated” across the four years.
This is a setback not just for Cameron but for most of “old Europe”, all of whom have more lavish social security systems than the nations of “new Europe”. But in reality there was never any chance that the Eastern European nations would approve a deal as swingeing as the one Cameron originally proposed, and in any case, that’s not Cameron’s biggest problem.
It’s this: immigration to Britain is not driven by the promise of a life of Riley under the warm embrace of the British welfare state, but by Britain’s booming jobs market. It won’t do a thing to reduce immigration to Britain – and reducing immigration is probably the Leave campaign’s biggest weapon in the In-Out referendum.
Of course, that might not matter. The Leave campaigns are still, at present, badly split, and the demographic that campaigners have picked out as the crucial swing vote – women who are worried about security, and get the bulk of their news from Mail Online and Facebook – are more concerned about security than immigration as far as the In-Out question are concerned.
But it should worry pro-Europeans that if attention does turn to British immigration, all Cameron has to offer is a graduated reduction in benefits for EU migrants.
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