Over the last year at least, the British government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been faced with calls for decisions on the political character of the United Kingdom. These include the extent of internal integration of the component parts of the United Kingdom on the one hand, and the extent, on the other, of what some from within and on the fringes of his Conservative Party believe to be too close an external integration of Britain with European Community(EU).
On the first issue of national unity Cameron eventually felt constrained, in the face of pressure from the Scottish nationalists, to announce a referendum on Scotland’s future adherence to the UK. And now he seems on the brink of conceding to the opponents of Britain’s membership of the EU, a referendum on that issue as well. So over the next year and a half or so, Britain and its Conservative Party rulers could well be extensively preoccupied with voting.
The issue of Britain’s commitment to the EU was the result of a referendum in the face of intense divisions on the issue. Then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also held one in 1975 on the case for the country’s adherence to the Single Market. So a precedent has been well set for the populist mechanism of direct appeal to the people, rather than to the people’s Parliament, normally considered in the Westminster system to be the source of legitimacy for national decision-making between elections.
Cameron who says that he is of the view that the UK should stay in the European Union, would appear, under the intense pressure of the Conservative Party’s right wing and the fringe United Kingdom Independence Party, a kind of offshoot of the Conservatives, to want to call his opponents’ bluff, in the belief that faced with the reality of departure, and the constitutional and economic unravelling that it will entail, the electorate will go his way. But he cannot be so sure. For in the case of the London area, the extremely popular Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has allied himself with those opposed to remaining with the rest of Europe.
Cameron is therefore trying to cut a deal with the other European countries that will allow him to opt out of some elements of the integration system, while leaving the UK with a still substantial presence and influence. He sees Britain’s decision not to join the Eurozone as a precedent, and one that followed another successful initiative on Britain’s part – exclusion from the so-called Schengen Agreement that allowed the UK not to be an extensive part of the freedom of movement system of the wider area.
No doubt, the Europeans can read Cameron’s stratagem of seeking a negotiation with the EU that can be perceived to be successful, so calling his domestic opponents’ bluff and taking the pressure off once and for all, and well before the next British general election. This was something like what Mrs Thatcher attempted, successfully, on the Single Market.
But first, the intensity of opposition to the EU as is, would appear to also infect some of the higher ranks of the Conservative Party. And secondly, from the EU’s end, the opposition, almost hostility, which countries like Germany and France felt from Britain’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the efforts which they proposed, and eventually succeeded with, in the case of the recent Eurozone crisis, hardly makes them willing to go the extra mile to assist Cameron in taking the anti-Europe monkey in England off his back.
The Europeans, of course, cannot afford to take an entirely standoffish stance towards Cameron’s predicament. Their certain preference would be for the UK to remain in the Union, given the significance of the British economy, including the strategic character of the City of London. In appreciating that they have on their side a substantial insistence from within the British business sector that even a loose alliance along the lines required by some opponents of remaining in the EU would be damaging, the Germans know that they have a significant ally in what is an economically strategic country in their economic integration system.
The United States too, would appear to be somewhat fed up with the political gymnastics in Britain on the EU issue. They have gone as far as President Obama recently calling on the UK not to diminish the strength of the EU – which is what they perceive a British departure would do – by leaving the system. Given that the EU-US economic nexus constitutes the largest trading-investment system in the world, the Americans see a British loosening of connections as deeply threatening to global stability, given the already threatening clouds of continuing European-American recession.
The Americans also perceive the significance of that economic alliance in terms of developing and sustaining strategic Western economic decision-making in the Doha and related multilateral trade talks, and capable of resisting alternative policy positions, whether emanating from China or from the BRICS.
Some in the United Kingdom and elsewhere question Cameron’s ability to achieve a successful referendum vote given the depth of the current recession in the UK, the slowness with which any recovery is predicted, and the consequent general pessimism among the electorate. In addition the present context is one in which the Liberal coalition partner of the Conservatives is itself rapidly losing economic support as it appears to be unable to prevent the coalition led by the Conservatives from implementing measures to which its supporters are opposed, including a positive adherence to the EU.
Others sympathetic to the Conservatives seem to doubt whether Cameron has the political agility to challenge and win like Margaret Thatcher. And the Labour opposition would seem to be of that view too, as it sits relatively quietly on the sidelines up to now,allowing Cameron to make the running. They see a referendum as a kind of diversion from the preoccupations of the voters, introducing less cohesiveness among the electorate, at a time when the Government needs all the support that it can get to sustain momentum for its economic policies.
With less and less empathy from the UK on issues strategic for us such as the Air Passenger Duty, and at a time when we surely realize the significance of the EU for our development, we unfortunately just have to wait and see the outcome and its consequences.
