With the recently held general elections in Britain now over, indicating what is held to be reasonably strong sentiment in favour of a changing of the relationship between that country and the European (EU) Union, the re-elected Conservative government has accepted the challenge of a referendum for the electorate to decide on proposals for a revised relationship.
Clearly the leadership of the two main parties, Conservative and Labour, has been reluctant to go through yet another referendum (after the one held in 1975) on the country’s participation in the European integration experiment. But with the fringe United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), an offshoot mainly of the Conservative Party itself, attaining nearly 13% of the vote, and coming second in 120 of the 650 parliamentary seats (though actually winning only one seat), Prime Minister David Cameron has felt himself constrained to maintain his earlier promise to accede to UKIP’s insistence on a referendum.
This situation is not entirely dissimilar from the one which the British Labour Party government, then led by Harold Wilson, experienced, in 1975, when it bowed to assumed widespread British sentiment, feeling that it had no course of action but to call a referendum on EU accession. The government’s position that the situation of that time required that Britain, however reluctantly, should join the EU, now seems to be reflected in the present situation. And Cameron, even with strong negative sentiment in his own Conservative Party, has found it necessary to bow to what is now believed to be something of a consensus among the British electorate.
On the European continent itself, there would appear to be some degree of concern that a British government should once again feel that anti-EU sentiment is so strong, that it must initiate, for the second time, a necessarily prolonged and diverting attempt at negotiation of its status within the EU. But Prime Minister Cameron and his party have now found themselves in the position that Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labour government found itself in 1975. For then, Labour, in opposition, insisted there would be a referendum in the general elections of 1974 which it won, and of necessity had to keep its promise to the electorate.
So in the general elections recently held, the ball was in the Conservatives’ court, and Cameron could not resist making a similar pledge. But following the referendum on Scotland’s relationship with the United Kingdom, the notion of a referendum, not normally assumed to be acceptable to British opinion, would appear, in fact, to have become a norm; and it is left to the government to satisfy both the Labour Party and a wider electorate, a portion of which seems to believe that the terms of immigration from the EU are too generous.
What will be interesting, in that domestic situation, will be the response of the opposition Labour Party to the terms presented to the parliament by the government. The party recently supported the Conservative government in the referendum on the position of Scotland in the United Kingdom, but seems, from the general elections results, not to have got a positive payback in the general elections. It is therefore quite unlikely that they will easily support whatever proposals Cameron puts forward.
Instead, it is possible that even if their current position is that they support Britain’s continuing membership, they will take something of a hard line, perhaps on matters relating to the terms of the benefits which immigrants receive on entry into the UK. And further, from a domestic political perspective, Labour will have in its mind the fact that they gave strong support to the government’s position in the Scottish referendum, only to be wiped out there, with the Scottish nationalists capturing almost all the traditional Labour seats.
Within the EU itself, the decision of the post-election Conservative government, while probably held to be inevitable, seems to have been felt to be an impediment to the further development of the system. In some quarters it may well be felt that the Conservatives have brought this situation on themselves, and that the referendum decision has less to do with reforms in the functioning of the Union, and more to do with the present situation within the Conservative Party itself.
This, however, is not a position that they can assert very strongly, since they recognize that in all the European democracies, continued domestic public consent comes before concessions to external interests. Perhaps their more serious concern is that in a situation where many EU states are gradually recovering from various levels of recession, and have been having to take relatively unpopular decisions in the process, a preoccupation with negotiations with the United Kingdom can be perceived, by domestic opinion, as a diversion from domestic measures including persistent consolidation of the EU.
Indeed, these European preoccupations, and therefore a necessary preoccupation with external matters, including wider negotiations towards a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership proposed by the United States and launched in 2013, and the American-initiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, for which negotiations began in 2014, would seem to the major European states to be, in the wider international sphere of things, more crucial than Britain’s continuing, if domestically forced, preoccupation with reorganizing the EU system to its particular advantage.
For the fact of the matter is, that these initiatives seen, in part, as responses to the increasing influence of China in the reorganization of the global economy, would seem, in the US, to have an overwhelming priority at this time; and therefore, a ranking well above the British preoccupation with pondering on what many believe to be its inevitable, deeper, linkage with the European Union integration system.
Yet, on the other hand, Prime Minister Cameron and his Conservative Party will probably be taking the position reflected in an old adage, that ‘all politics is local’; and that preference must be given to the assumed necessary conditions of his party’s domestic survival, as a preface to his government’s vibrancy in international politics.
In that context, the referendum risk is, regardless of external opinion, his.
