Today at 11am we will find out what Britain’s new relationship with the EU will look like. Downing Street insists that the draft renegotiation outline being published by European Council president Donald Tusk is still a draft, and there may well be changes to it (though presumably not all of them beneficial to Britain) in the next few weeks.
But it looks as though the European Council summit on 18 and 19 February will be discussing and signing off this renegotiation, and that therefore the June referendum is on.
The biggest challenge that David Cameron, who will give a speech later today on the proposals, has to overcome is any sense among voters that this new relationship between Britain and the EU is rather too much like the old one. The papers this morning are not hugely sympathetic, with the Sun and the Mail in particular striking a rather downbeat note. The ’emergency brake’ that Cameron has made a fair bit of fuss about is only for in work benefits for migrants, and even the modest impact this might have on pull factors for migrants will be superseded by the government’s own living wage. The ‘red card’ that would allow EU member states to refuse directives and repeal existing laws as a group is being dismissed by the eurosceptic campaign groups as a ‘gimmick’ and the Prime Minister will need to explain how this will really be any more effective than the existing poorly-used ‘yellow card’ system.
But his task is made rather easier by the fact that the eurosceptic campaign groups aren’t in the best fighting shape at the very time they should be shaping the narrative about the renegotiation. Still, even a weak Leave camp doesn’t make it so easy that Cameron doesn’t need to explain what happened to the vision he set out in his Bloomberg speech for a new relationship.
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