Downing Street has made plans for David Cameron to return to London immediately on Friday if the summit concludes with an agreement. Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Alberto Nardelli, Nicholas Watt, and Ian Traynor in Brussels
A leaked copy of the final draft of the blueprint for Britain’s new terms of EU membership suggests that David Cameron heads to Brussels with no certainty over one of his key demands – and signs that differences are widening.
The series of documents, which were circulated in Brussels early on Thursday morning, confirm that the European council president, Donald Tusk, has failed to win agreement among EU leaders to cement some of the reforms in a change to the Lisbon treaty.
In the drafts, which were sent to EU capitals late on Wednesday and which have been seen by the Guardian, any mention of revising the treaty appears between square brackets – the device used in international negotiations to show there is no agreement on that issue.
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The drafts also show that differences in some areas are widening rather than narrowing. The unease in France that Britain is seeking to secure special protections for the City of London, by giving non-eurozone members a greater ability to stall financial regulation, is highlighted by the appearance of square brackets in an early section in the first document on a proposed new rulebook for eurozone and non-eurozone countries.
The influence of east European countries, which have grave concerns about proposed restrictions to child benefits and in-work benefits, is highlighted by a section on the welfare changes. A key sentence that would have restricted the child benefit curbs to Britain has been taken out, suggesting that the new rules will apply across the EU uniformly. This will be very poorly received by the Visegrad group of countries in eastern and central Europe – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The documents were circulated as British officials conceded that the prime minister may fail in his original demand to cement the reforms in a change to the EU treaty and EU diplomats said a “war room of lawyers” had been brought in to assist all 28 national leaders. British officials said that securing treaty change headed a list of “outstanding things” that the prime minister had yet to secure in his negotiations, which he launched soon after the Conservatives’ general election victory last year.
Tusk, who is chairing the summit, has failed to win consensus among EU leaders for treaty change in two key areas. These are the prime minister’s call to give the UK an opt-out from the EU’s commitment to create an “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”, and to guarantee protections for non-eurozone member states.
A failure to underpin the reforms would represent a setback for Cameron, who pledged last year to secure “full-on treaty change”. Downing Street insists that an agreement among the EU’s 28 leaders would be “legally binding” and would be lodged at the UN regardless of whether treaty change is agreed.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Angela Merkel speaks to the German parliament. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock
But there will be nerves among pro-EU Tories that Cameron could enter a referendum campaign with Eurosceptics claiming there was uncertainty over whether his reform package could be challenged in the European court of justice.
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If Cameron loses the referendum, he would face immediate pressure to resign. If he wins, his supporters will say he deserves a place among the list of transformational prime ministers after securing Scotland’s place in the UK in one referendum and settling Britain’s membership of the EU in another.
The uncertainty over treaty change came amid quiet confidence in Whitehall that Cameron will secure agreement from the EU’s 27 other leaders for his new terms for Britain’s EU membership. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Wednesday that Cameron’s demands were “comprehensible and justified”.
As well as the two demands on ever closer union and protections for non-eurozone countries that require treaty change, Cameron is seeking to impose restrictions on child benefit and in-work benefits for EU migrants. On Wednesday it was announced that the total number of workers in the UK from the rest of the EU had risen above two million for the first time.
Johnson keeps Cameron waiting
Downing Street has made plans for Cameron to return to London immediately if the summit concludes on Friday lunchtime with an agreement. The prime minister would chair a cabinet meeting at which the government would formally endorse a deal. But the meeting would also lead to the lifting of collective cabinet responsibility, allowing a group of ministers, currently headed by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, to campaign to leave the EU.
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has kept the prime minister waiting about whether he intends to support the campaign to keep Britain in a reformed EU. He told Cameron at a meeting in Downing Street that he had not yet been won round to a plan to reassert the sovereignty of parliament in a process that will take place outside the formal EU negotiations.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Boris Johnson leaves Downing Street after talks with David Cameron. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP
Tusk will open the formal part of the summit at 5.45pm with a round table discussion about the UK’s demands. Tusk will then park the UK negotiations to allow EU leaders to turn to the other main item on the agenda over dinner – the migration crisis.
The summit will reconvene at 10am on Friday as an informal European council. This will allow Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, to attend. The parliament has to agree to the welfare changes in secondary legislation.
In addition to the concerns about treaty change British officials said that the outstanding issues boiled down to:
Making sure all leaders agree to the demand to protect non-eurozone countries, essentially ensuring that the eurozone cannot change the regulations for the City of London without UK agreement.
Ensuring that Britain is allowed to restrict in-work benefits to EU migrants through an emergency brake. The prime minister wants this to last for four years, though Tusk has said this should be phased out after one year.
Upholding restrictions to child benefit to ensure that it is paid at a rate linked to indices in the migrant’s home country. Cameron concedes that this will not apply retrospectively.
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‘English breakfast’
According to officials and diplomats involved in preparing and attending the summit, the expectations are of a tense eveningon Thursday. The summit is expected to run through the night until Friday morning, when leaders might assemble to finalise a deal over an “English breakfast”.
Others talked of it running into the weekend. “There’s an appetite to try to get there and take as long as it takes,” said one diplomat. Tusk said he wanted to resolve the British question conclusively at the summit: “It is my goal to do the deal this week.”
The east Europeans have rejected the proposed terms of how child benefits are paid to their citizens working in Britain while their children reside at home. They want the new rules to apply only to new arrivals in Britain, an idea to which Cameron is resistant, and they want the new regime ringfenced so that it applies solely to Britain. This is generally viewed, even by the Britons, as legally impossible.
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The restriction on child benefits, by way of indexing payments to where a child is based, would appear to be optional and at the discretion of the member state paying the benefit. The measure would only apply to child benefits, with the document explicitly stating it would not be used for other payments such as old-age pensions.
Another sticking point, the graduated payment of in-work benefits once an emergency brake is in place, also remains in the draft although precise terms have yet to be agreed.
The documents confirm that Britain meets the criteria to request the emergency brake immediately. In particular one of the documents notes that the UK “has not made full use of the transitional periods on free movement of workers which were provided for in recent Accession Acts”, leading to the government’s concerns over an “exceptional inflow of workers from elsewhere in the EU over the last years”.
The triggering of the four-year safeguard mechanism, which can be requested by a member state when its public services and welfare system are under exceptional pressure due to high migration, is assessed by the European commission and approved by other member states through the council.
All the measures in the agreement would be implemented if the UK voted to remain in the EU.
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