The Ins and Outs of European Union Membership

It looks as if events - or perhaps that should be les evenements -  have come already for Mr Cameron's administration.  The German Chancellor is so right to demand that the Lisbon Treaty must be revised to provide  permanent mechanisms to deal with the kind of financial meltdown threatened in the last years and the behaviour of some member states in their irresponsible borrowing behaviour (and, in the case of some, owning up to it in official statistics).

What is to be done is a matter for negotiation: the level of automaticity in institutional responses, the retribution for rule-breaking, all this must be settled by negotiation.  What cannot be negotiated away is the need to reopen the Treaty to achieve any useful change in the economic and financial governance of the Union.  And to contemplate introducing changes of the order required while the Treaty is reopened for the admission of the Croats is not serious.  Setting up crisis avoidance and control measures for the Euro  is a central change in the relations of the member states to the Union; and it is irrelevant that the United Kingdom does not use the Euro; the UK is as bound by the Maastricht (and the Stability and Growth pact) conventions as any other member state of the European Union.

The Coalition holds diametrically opposed views on the EU:  Conservatives committed against any further concessions of sovereignty and the retrieval of some powers already given over; Liberals committed to all and every EU goal,  to ever-deeper union.  There's no point rehashing all the arguments over the Lisbon Treaty, but they all stand.  This time there must be a referendum and the question to be answered must be In or out?  Yes or no?

The temporary emergency measures for the crisis come to an end in 2013.  Apart from this the Germans will not permit as a permanent solution  the transfer of their money, or even their guarantees, to peripheral and fiscally undisciplined member states. Nor are the centre-right member states, in the vast majority among the 27 member states now, willing to accept ever again the kind of deficit-drunk, vulgar-keynesian economics espoused by those  who have had to be bailed-out, or have pulled back from the brink only just in time.  Certainly, too,  there is full awareness  that a post-Lisbon treaty will trigger referendums in those countries where constitutional change of this order overtly requires it, and in the UK.   So Germany wants to make a start straight away, this week; has made a start.

Mr Cameron should say at once that  changes like these do affect the United Kingdom, even though we have retained the use of Sterling; that we must engage fully in the negotiations; that the government will report back to Parliament  as these negotiations progress; that once the best deal available for the country has been set out to the country there will be a referendum; and that the question will be whether or not the country wishes to remain within the European Union under the terms of the revised Treaty.   Then his government can get on with sorting out the mess left from the last 13 years of economic and financial mismanagement.

And when we do vote the anti-European Unionists might find they have a very close run for their money.