The Economist - amongst others on both sides of the political fray - has been busily portraying Cameron as an arch gambler this past week concerning his EU-antics.
I think this is playing into Cameron's hands, and that he's not really gambling all that much at all.
Firstly, there is one small area of gamble around the EU vote when it gets put to the public. I say small as it seems to me very unlikely that people will vote to exit the EU. We know all the main political parties will campaign to stay in. We know the current opinion polls show the vote being close. We know that in the run up to any referendum businesses will overwhelmingly be campaigning and bank-rolling the activities of those campaigning for a yes vote. With this in mind, the electorate would have to be very bloody minded to vote to exit, would it not?
Setting aside that small gamble, there's not much left. It seems people believe Cameron doesn't know the position of his EU counterparts, and they may not give anything away during negotiations, meaning they'd rather the UK just sodded off. But we know Merkel is a proponent of the UK staying in, and that the uncertainty that would be caused to the EU project by the UK exiting would be hugely destabilising in a number of different ways (economic, social and foreign policy at least).
We also know that Merkel and other European leaders were in touch with Cameron before he made his speech. We can therefore take it as read that he, as any mature politician would do, explained the predicament he was in, that he was going to offer a referendum to the people of the UK, and ask how the leaders would react to that...
... and here's the rub; Cameron would have discussed the referendum, and explained that he would be putting it to the people after renegotiation of terms of membership, and needs some small - phyrric - victory with which to return home, to ensure a vote winner in both general election terms and the referendum for Cameron. Is it not very likely, that Merkel, and others would have said 'ok - we will give you something small, we can guarantee something small during renegotiations (e.g. the working time directive not applying to the UK?), which you can take home, to portray as a victory.... then you'll very likely succeed at referendum as the people's appetite would have been satiated.
Finally, Cameron has unquestionably fixed one issue with his 'gamble'; as the polls over the weekend have shown, he has nabbed a heap of voters from UKIP, who are now completely stuffed come the next election.
So, perhaps it's a gamble for me to say it as the world of politics is inherently unpredictable (of course - if things go horribly horribly wrong in Europe in 5 years time, perhaps exit wouldn't be ridiculous... but that seems low on the likelihood threshold given things are already so bad and yet the polls are still close on in-out).... but I don't think Cameron has gambled that much here... I think he has played a strategic blinder, which Labour and others are queuing, or perhaps bumbling into cack-handedly.
If I were working with Labour I would be hammering out what Cameron's 'red-lines' on Europe are - I promise he has none, because he needs to wait until the negotiations are truly in the bag before he can be utterly certain of what little piffling victory he can come home with which will garner him votes and an EU referendum victory.
No comments:
Post a Comment