Five days before the Queen’s Speech, David Cameron is taking on the first big challenge of this new Parliament: renegotiating our relationship with the EU. He’s undertaking a whistle-stop tour of European capitals today, focusing on the smaller countries at first. As the Prime Minister sets off for a summit in Riga in Latvia, he was keen to point out that it’s far from a hop, skip and jump to a referendum next year:
‘These talks will not be easy. They will not be quick. There will be different views and disagreements along the way. But by working together in the right spirit and sticking at it, I believe we can find solutions that will address the concerns of the British people and improve the EU as a whole. After all we are not alone in wanting to make the EU work better for people across Europe. And that is what I’m determined to do.’
Cameron has a better hand than he could have expected in two respects. Firstly, he has a clear democratic mandate from the British electorate to reform our relationship — no European leaders can claim he is acting out of concern for the more right wing elements of his party. Secondly, there is a sense that others in Europe are poised for change. With visits planned to Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande on this tour, the PM will hope to keep up the positive rhetoric of change across the EU and show he is working in tandem, not alone.
But given yesterday’s immigration figures, which were not far off the all time high of 320,000 in 2005, Cameron has no choice but to do something about free movement of people. His current plan to restrict benefits for new arrivals into Britain may be the best he can realistically achieve, but the more Eurosceptic parts of British politics will point out this is only a tweak to open borders and the principle of freedom of movement remains fundamentally unchanged.
This renegotiation and referendum is going to be as much about how the results are painted as to exactly what is achieved. As Daniel Hannan pointed out on the Today programme, all of the European leaders will extoll whatever package the Prime Minister cobbles together and claim the British have got what they wanted. The more important question is whether the British public are persuaded by either the nitty gritty, or the new grand picture.
Listen to Daniel Hannan discuss Britain’s relationship with the EU on the BBC Today programme:
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