Britain: End the drift in our relationship with Europe

As we report today, Liam Fox, the former secretary of state for defence, makes a powerful case for renegotiating our relationship with the rest of the European Union. The countries that have adopted the euro will press ahead with the fiscal and political union that is needed to save the single currency.

Britain is not part of that group, and does not want to be. But the countries in the euro group will form a voting bloc within the EU, and that bloc will of course act to implement regulation that is in its own interests, but which may well damage Britain. Rules governing the financial industry are one example.

There are plans to strip members of the EU that have not entered the single currency of the right to conduct deals denominated in euros. This would be highly damaging to the City.

That is just one instance of the sort of regulation that the eurozone countries might adopt to ensure that they can operate as a single fiscal and political entity. There are other areas – such as justice and home affairs, employment law, and agriculture and fisheries – where Britain’s interests are likely to diverge from the countries in the euro core, and where the regulations favoured by those countries would not suit us.

If a renegotiation of our relationship with the EU can be achieved, argues Dr Fox, it should be followed by a referendum, in which the question would be straightforward: do you wish to continue as a member of the new EU? Dr Fox thinks he could campaign for the answer “Yes” if a consensus with our European partners on a looser relationship was reached. But he would not support continued membership if it became clear that Britain was being drawn deeper into an increasingly integrated European Union.

Support from big hitters in the Tory party is beginning to coalesce around that position. Boris Johnson, for instance, has argued that we need to negotiate a new relationship with the rest of the EU, one based more around a simple free-trade association than the super-state that has been the goal of EU officials for the past two decades. The suggestion makes good sense – providing that one basic objection to it turns out to be wrong. Christopher Booker maintains this week that “there is no indication” that any renegotiation of our relationship with the EU is possible unless we first state that we wish to leave it. Dr Fox, in contrast, argues that if we renegotiate with self-confidence – instead of capitulating before the discussion begins, as the Foreign Office has done so often in the past – we could succeed.

Note EU-Digest:  here they go again. Its all about selfish British  interest throwing overboard the common good.  London City as a financial hub for the European Union and the Euro makes no sense in the above described scenario.

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