I want to do a longer post than normal about an excellent speech given by Sir Ivan Rogers, our former UK Representative to the EU who resigned earlier this year, to Hertford College, Oxford. It is labelled as the inside story of how David Cameron drove Britain to Brexit (see it all HERE) and it contained a lot of things that I think explain much of the thinking of the former PM.
I don't want to go to far back but there are some key things that were done by Tony Blair that at the time were badly received in the UK, particularly by Eurosceptics, but I don't believe anyone seriously thought they would lead to Brexit. The first was Blair's agreement to a reduction in our rebate in 2005. Sir Ivan says:
".... the UK’s net contribution rose dramatically just before and through the Cameron tenure. But that was indeed because the UK rebate was, in the 2005 deal, disapplied on structural funds spending in the newly acceded Eastern Member States. And the effects of that decision grew rapidly at the end of the 2007-13 Budget Framework period. After Cameron’s election as PM".
The other issue was the question of immigration and the sharp rise in immigrants from the accession countries in eastern Europe. Sir Ivan says:
"The political effect of the decision of May 2004 to allow free movement of people into the UK from those states without the seven year transitional period for which their Accession Treaties provided, of which all the other major western Member States took advantage, was even more critical".
So, Cameron, when he came to office in 2010 was faced with two problems not of his own making and this was following on from the 2008 financial crisis that he and Osborne were dealing with for sterling, as the ECB was doing the same for the Eurozone. But there was a big problem that no one had foreseen in the treaties. This was the fact that:
".......... there is no legal base in the current Treaties which permits eurozone-specific legislation, those of us around him spent a large part of that year ensuring that the use of Single Market articles of the Treaty as a legal base for Banking Union legislation did not suck us into a project which we viewed, but others did not, as one intrinsic to the monetary union, not the Single Market"
"As the crisis in the eurozone intensified, they [the ECB] needed to make urgent institutional changes to shore up monetary union and prevent disaster. But no such institutional changes, requiring changes in the primary law, could, under the EU Treaties, be made unless all the Member States agreed and ratified them. In other words, the UK was obliged to legislate, at speed, to permit changes deemed by the members of the eurozone essential to save the Eurozone, in discussions in which, inevitably, as were outside the monetary union, we were not present.
So, Cameron tried to use the UK's veto power to block changes needed for the Eurozone, of which we were not even a member, to secure changes that he wanted to restore unanimity to some votes, returning these from qualified majority voting. The rest of the EU were not happy about this approach and resented Cameron using a crisis to force things through. They found a technical way around the treaties and made decisions without the UK.
"But the Cameron attempt to lever open the negotiation got nowhere. Berlin and Paris essentially went round him. A couple of days before the December European Council, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, at a European People’s Party Heads meeting at Marseilles decided to circumvent a potential British blockade of the amendment of the Treaties by doing the deal at 17 via a partly intergovernmental Treaty process, which would not require UK ratification. The resulting Fiscal Compact is now known as the Fiscal Stability Treaty".
"As the crisis intensified in 2012, and the question of Grexit (the possible departure of Greece from the eurozone and the potential contagion effects of permitting or forcing it to leave) dominated the Spring and Summer, the eurozone moved more rapidly to start developing a so-called Banking Union—the only politically feasible institutional step it might be able to agree, given the impossibility of reaching any agreement on debt mutualisation or on a eurozone transfer union".
"Cameron was pro a Banking Union, provided it was a genuine one—and providing the UK had no part in it.
"Again, this was not a theoretical concern. And it carried huge taxpayer risks and generated inevitable political heat at Westminster.
"To be clear, there was, in my view, simply no reputable alternative position to the one Cameron took on these issues. And this is why the Union of 2012 was so different from the Community of pre Maastricht years, and why much criticism of the UK supposedly absenting itself from a central role is so misplaced".
Rogers is complementary about Cameron in many ways:
"To return to Cameron personally on money, I would argue he ran a very smart Budget negotiation, and one saw him, at European Council level, at his most engaged and effective. He was all over the detail. My point is simply that, though he delivered an impressive deal, it made scant impact on the politics of UK membership. The same, incidentally, applied to other issues—from Russian sanctions to the handling of the Ebola crisis—on which Cameron’s leadership at European Council level was impressive".
We know what then ensued. The negotiations with the EU and his attempt to settle the issue once and for all with an in/out referendum. He came close but in the end he failed and Brexit is the result.
The three key points in my opinion were the Blair decisions about immigration and the budget rebate and the treaty problem that did not allow Eurozone nations to coordinate policy together without involving other non Euro countries like Britain. Had these not happened perhaps we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.
I encourage you to read the whole speech. It's quite long and dense but well worth the effort.
