European Games

First off, a declaration. I am very much pro the EU, but not uncritically so. Even its most ardent supporters openly acknowledge that things are not perfect and a lot more needs to be done. For me, however, the EU is at its best when it protects EU citizens from their national governments. Without the EU, many bad laws would have been enacted by the British Government, particularly those that impacted on freedoms or our protections, particularly from large corporations. Examples such as the 90 days detention, the BT Phorm trials and the ongoing anti-competitive investigations by the EU into Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Google are prominent in my mind. So for all its faults, particularly in the way it operates and spends money, there are a lot of good things to say about what the EU does.

And so I now look at Cameron's speech on Europe which is still generating significant press coverage. My verdict is that there are some good principles in there. The Germans and the French do want the UK to get more involved, to push for beneficial change to the EU and to counter the perceived dominance of those two countries on most European issues. The UK is seen as a major player with a lot that it can bring to the table. However, I can only think that Cameron's strategy in pushing for this change is driven by political pressures, not by any realistic analysis of how best to go about bringing change and thus improving the EU. The European way of doing business is very much about obtaining consensus. Turning up from the beginning with a threat and a list of demands does not get things off to a good start!

My view is very much that Cameron (or any PM) should have simply signalled that the UK want to propose a number of changes which the UK feels is needed for itself, but would also benefit the EU as a whole. This could have been reinforced by a statement that the EU was becoming democratically tenuous in the UK (and other countries) and so it is critical that the UK government is able to demonstrate that the EU remains relevant and beneficial to the lives of UK voters. This is the sort of position that European leaders can understand and agree with. It is both a promise to be reasonable and a threat to challenge the democratic legitimacy of the EU if it cannot reform.

As for the issue of a referendum, Cameron is being as hypocritical as he accuses Alex Salmond and the SNP of being over the issue of Scottish independence. If you are going to have a seismic referendum, you should set the  date to be as short as decently possible only allowing enough time for a proper debate and not such a long period that it creates a whole load of planning and investment uncertainties. I am not saying that there should not be a referendum, but either it should be called quickly or Cameron should have left it as an unspoken threat for the EU to ponder over. That way, the UK has a strong hand in its negotiations, EU leaders can hardly be motivated to avoid the threat that a referendum brings if it is an inevitability. I fear, that the political pressure has over-ruled any common sense on this matter.

I know from my own work that being a leading member of  the EU brings significant benefits to the UK and I am going to share one example that illustrates this point. About five years ago I was dealing with a problem where working with the US was being problematic due to the way the Americans implemented their laws when co-operating with foreign governments. This issue was causing huge delays to work and creating a whole host of problems such as legal liabilities and delays to the UK. The UK had spent years trying to solve this problem, but to no avail as the Americans were not willing to change their position. My boss and I therefore approached our counterparts in the other five biggest countries within the EU to ask if they were having the same problems. Lo and behold they all replied that they were and so we set up several meetings to discuss it and to hammer out a strategy. We then invited the Americans to meet all six of us to discuss this problem which they willingly did. As a result, the Americans realised that they had a problem that needed fixing and so they went away and did so. For them, this was the ideal international co-operative scenario - the UK led the big European nations to clearly articulate the problem. Once the Americans proposed a solution, it could be agreed by the Europeans as a whole thus saving them from having to repeat the work for other countries and everyone went away happy.

Now of course, I can also give several examples of where working within the EU has not been so successful. But the example above illustrates why so many nations, both and and out of Europe want the UK to remain a leading member. It also shows how the UK is able to make itself more influential than if it tried to solve all these problems on its own. This is influence that political blustering and a UK only attitude cannot buy, it would be ludicrous to claim that giving it up would not have significant consequences. Is it worth what we pay the EU? That is a much harder question to answer, but what is clear is that the situation is far from black and white and the UK would be unlikely to be able to use the money saved to be able to protect its interests and influence world events as effectively as it does now.