Europe

David Cameron’s complaints at last night’s EU meeting about the lack of a growth agenda have, in part, been addressed by the new draft conclusions. Cameron — who was supported by the Dutch, Italians and Spanish — seems to have secured promises on the completion of the single market, deregulation and the services directive in the summit’s draft conclusions. This isn’t going to turn around the European economy. But it is a step in the right direction and a small, but possibly significant, victory for the PM.   I understand from sources in Brussels that there has been frustration with the extent to which the conclusions presented last night simply

When David Cameron headed to Brussels last December, it was far from certain that he would veto the proposed treaty. It was only when Nicolas Sarkozy proved totally uninterested in accommodating Britain’s demands that the Prime Minister decided that he could not sign up to it. In a way, Sarkozy did Cameron a favour. Imagine if Britain had got the safeguards the Prime Minister wanted and had signed up to the treaty. How would he then have reacted this week, when the Irish announced that they were going to hold a referendum on it? The pressure from the Tory benches to let the British people vote on it would have

Two items of news that may unsettle stomachs in Euroland today: i) that Ireland is planning to hold a referendum on the new European fiscal treaty, and ii) that the UK is pushing — as April’s European summit in Brighton approaches — for the European Convention on Human Rights to be rewritten so that national courts have greater discretion and power. The BBC’s James Landale has more details on the latter here, but the basic point is that the government has circulated a ‘position paper’ that proposes injecting a few principles and particulars into the ECHR. One of these is ‘subsidiarity’, the idea that decisions should be made at the

Seems that the latest plan to fix the eurozone involves cooking up a pot of alphabet soup. Over in Mexico, G20 finance ministers are currently discussing whether to blend two existing eurozone bailout funds, the EFSF and the ESM, with some extra money from the IMF. They hope that this EFSF-ESM-IMF mix will add up to about £1.25 trillion of ready cash for failing eurozone economies. ‘Look at the size of our fund,’ they will then say, as they try to settle nerves across Europe and beyond. Details are lacking, but some things are already worth noting about this potential mega fund. First is that it seems to be coming

Britain out of Brussels’ clutches by 2020? It can happen, says David Owen, in a piece for the magazine this week. It’s based on a speech to Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Here’s the full version: In all the controversy about the eurozone and Greece it is easy to ignore one simple fact: maintaining a core eurozone is creating an unstoppable momentum towards a United States of Europe. On 7 February 2012 the German Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated very clearly her direction of travel. The eurozone crisis for her is to be the springboard to another Treaty to replace the Lisbon Treaty. She said ‘Step-by-step, European politics is merging with domestic politics.’

The news that Theresa May will fly to Jordan to continue talks about Abu Qatada shows how close the government thinks it is to a deal with the Jordanians that might satisfy the European Court of Human Rights and allow his deportation. One government source explained to me earlier that the problem is the Jordanians are offended by being asked to provide these guarantees about a fair trial and no evidence being obtained by torture. For this reason, there needs to be a fair amount of diplomatic stroking. A deal with Jordan on Abu Qatada is becoming increasingly necessary if Cameron is get out of this bind on the ECHR,

The coming release of Abu Qatada on bail is going to put bellows under the whole debate about the European Court of Human Rights. In his recent speech to the Council of Europe, David Cameron rightly protested about a situation with terror suspects in which ‘you cannot try them, you cannot detain them and you cannot deport them.’ We will now find out how quickly Cameron is prepared to act on this issue. If Cameron wants to makes changes to the Courts and the Convention, then he is going to have to get agreement from every member of the Council of Europe. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to

When David Cameron wielded his veto at the European Council in December many Tories thought this was the beginning of a process of repatriation of powers from the EU. Myself, I thought it would be the high water mark of the government’s Euro-scepticism — and so it has proven. But things are about to get even worse for the Bill Cashes of this Parliament. In the short-term, at least.   Why so? Well, the government appears to be concluding that it will not get a receptive ear from its European partners on any repatriation bid. The other European leaders are simply too busy fixing the euro to even read any