Europe will be one of the political issues of the autumn. The government expects another
round of sovereign debt crises in the autumn and these will add urgency to the Merkel Sarkozy plan for ever closer fiscal union between the eurozone members.
Nearly every Tory MP and minister I have spoken to is instinctively sceptical of the Franco-German strategy. But Cameron, Osborne and Hague believe that because the Eurozone members won’t accept the break-up of the currency union, Britain has to back further fiscal integration in the hope that it will make the euro work. (Cynically, one might add that their position also makes life easier within the coalition given the Lib Dem’s Europhile leanings.) They hope to make the Tory party go along with this strategy by promising to use the moment to repatriate powers.
This is where things get tricky. Most Tories would like a lot back from Brussels, as Dominic Raab makes clear in his Sunday Times piece. But, as Tim Montgomerie cautions, the Liberal Democrats remain a Europhile party and unlikely to go along with any such strategy.
When I recently asked one Tory involved in the government’s discussions about what to do about Europe about this dilemma, he told me that Cameron, Osborne and Hague would not let the Liberal Democrats limit the extent of any renegotiation. Their view, he said, was that the Liberal Democrats could be overruled on this issue because they would not want to trigger a general election over it. Indeed, an election about repatriating powers from Brussels would be one fought on Tory turf. But so far there are few signs that the government is undertaking the detailed work necessary to prepare it for the coming moment.
One indicator of how proactive the government is prepared to be on this question will be Cameron’s conference speech. It’ll be intriguing to see if it sets out, in any detail, what he would like the status of Britain’s relationship with the EU to be.
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