We can trust Cameron on Europe

07 October 2009

Eurosceptics are not ‘swivel-eyed’ or psychotic, says Daniel Hannan, and it’s only Labour propagandists who think the party is divided on this issue

If the Conservative leader was not in time to stop the treaty going live, we felt, it would be slightly odd to hold a retrospective referendum. Better by far to negotiate the unilateral repatriation of powers to Westminster. And not simply the powers conceded at Lisbon: also a lengthy list of prerogatives surrendered at Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice. This, we agreed, would in some ways be better than a Lisbon referendum: instead of simply returning to the status quo ante — in other words, where we are now — it would allow us to improve on our present situation, recuperating many of the competences abandoned by the Blair and Major governments.

Paradoxically, such a dispensation might be easier to negotiate, since we would simply be asking the other member states to return powers to Britain, not presuming to tell them how to relate one to another. There is plenty of precedent: opt-outs from defence policy, the social chapter, the euro and the passport-free zone didn’t require the EU to reorder its institutional arrangements.

Any new deal, we concluded, would need to be put to the people. David Cameron’s pledge, after all, had been unequivocal. ‘Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee,’ he told the Sun exactly two years ago. ‘If I become prime minister, a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these [Lisbon] negotiations.’ At the very least, this must mean a referendum on whether Britain participates in them.

All in all, we were optimistic. Cameron, after all, had earned the benefit of the doubt. When he took his MEPs out of the palaeo-federalist EPP, he demonstrated that he would rather keep faith with British voters than suck up to the European establishment.