Tories preparing the ground for David Cameron’s renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe are to take MPs from other parties with them as they visit European cities, Coffee House has learned.
The Fresh Start Project, made up of Conservative MPs campaigning for reform of the European Union, has already visited Prague, Warsaw and Berlin to hold preliminary meetings setting out the need for change. Its next round of visits will include members of the All Party Parliamentary Group for European Reform, which is co-chaired by Fresh Start’s Andrea Leadsom and Labour’s Thomas Docherty.
The Conservative MPs organising the visits think including other parties will help them secure more meetings and also advance the case for reform in other Westminster parties as well.
The meetings have been going very well indeed so far, Leadsom tells me. She says the MPs have found European officials and politicians are very keen on change in the EU when they hear that the group’s ideas could benefit them. The key is for the politicians to understand that it’s not a case of Britain saying ‘we want this, that and the other to change’ but for those leading the negotiations to explain that this is about making Europe better. Leadsom says:
‘When we were in Berlin, whilst the German government’s position is that structural funds should not be reformed, nevertheless we found a lot of interest from German politicians in that type of reform. That really highlights to me that the position of the government might be rather different from the emerging position on the backbenches, and it does require preparation.’
The Fresh Start members believe reform of structural funds could knock 15 per cent from the overall EU budget, so no wonder German MPs were keen on the idea when they heard it.
Even though the group don’t have an official government shopping list for reform – because the government doesn’t have such a list – they have been using their own ideas and feeding back to the Foreign Office. The renegotiation hasn’t started yet, but this way of preparing the soil appears a promising start.
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