Since the election, Eurosceptics have had little to cheer about. Yes, we’re finally getting that in/out referendum we’ve been agitating for, but we lookincreasingly unlikely to win it.
The wording of the referendum question (“Should Britain remain a member of the European Union?”) means the europhiles will be able to campaign for a “yes” vote, the government has announced that the “purdah rules” will be relaxed, allowing ministers and officials to make pro-EU announcements during the campaign, and the polls suggests the “yes” side is beating the “no” side by about 55 per cent to 45 per cent at present.
So the publication of a report by Britain’s leading businessmen and womenarguing that David Cameron should campaign for a “no” vote unless we’re granted a veto for the UK over EU laws is welcome news. The 1,000-page report, entitled "Change, or Go", is the work of a group that includes Jon Moynihan, the former executive chairman at PA Consulting Group, Andrew Allum of LEK Consulting, the well-known venture capitalist Luke Johnson and Helena Morrissey, one of the City’s leading fund managers. It sets out a list of 10 demands the Prime Minister should make during his renegotiation, including exemption from the commitment to “ever closer union”, less red tape for businesses, control over migration policy, as well as social and employment laws, greater protection for non-eurozone states, a permanent reduction in the EU budget and the introduction of a “red card”, enabling Britain to veto EU measures it disagrees with.
These demands are considerably more ambitious than the reforms the Prime Minister has mentioned to date and are very unlikely to be met. Granting Britain a veto, for instance, would require Treaty change, something that has already been ruled out by his Spanish and Finnish counterparts. Indeed, even Cameron’s relatively modest proposal to ban EU migrants from claiming in-work benefits until they’ve been resident in the UK for four years has been rejected by the prime minister of Belgium and the president of Romania. At present, Cameron’s chances of securing any meaningful concessions at all from the leaders of the other 27 member states, let alone those set out in "Change, or Go", look remote.
I’m not such a died-in-the-wool eurosceptic that I can’t envisage any circumstances in which I’d vote “yes” in the referendum. But this list of 10 reforms is the absolute bare minimum. In all likelihood, therefore, I’ll be campaigning for a “no” vote – and the good thing about this 1,000-page report is that it looks very much like the eurosceptics will be joined by a powerful group of Britain’s leading business people.