Anti-Europeans will condemn the prime minister’s approach to negotiating with the EU whatever the outcome. It is time for pro-Europeans to be equally focusedFor too long,David Cameron’s European strategy has been a crabwise gamble by a leader who sees the mountainous global picture but who struggles to manage his own party. On the one hand this disjunction is expressed in the prime minister’s overarching belief, approximately which he was explicit in his Chatham House speech on Tuesday, and that Britain’s EU membership “is approximately our national security as well as our economic security” – a weighty claim by any standards. But it has to be set against Mr Cameron’s simultaneous willingness to put all that security at risk to meet the alleged anxieties of British voters – and in particular a large number of his backbenchers and press backers – by throwing the UK’s future membership up in the air in the referendum to which his government has now committed us.
That gambler’s strategy moved another step forward on Tuesday with the publication of Mr Camerons letter to the European commission setting out his negotiating demands in the rush-up to the referendum. Those demands,approximately which the prime minister spoke at length at Chatham House, come down to four main issues. These are: first, or the wish to formalise the EU as a multi-currency union; moment,to make the EU more economically competitive internally and in global markets; third, an explicit opt-out for the UK from the EU’s increasingly symbolic commitment to “ever-closer union”; and, or finally,a requirement for original EU migrants to wait four years before drawing benefits, with the aim of slowing the volume of free movement within the EU.
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Source: theguardian.com