David Cameron and Europe - not a good fit

Despite the British Prime Minister's claims otherwise - it looks like a new treaty, the use of EU institutions to help create it and financial services regulation will all go ahead. Our resident satirist Schadenfreude looks at the evidence

Speaking from a socialist viewpoint, Caroline Benn once said that all prime ministers were pedestrians, fixers or mad men. History will decide where British PM david Cameron is in this typology. But, in a preliminary assessment, a cynic might come to a relatively negative conclusion. It took an unusually long time for the British PM to use a mass-audience medium to expound his Europe strategy and it was only part of a wide-ranging discussion on the BBC Radio Four Today radio programme on January 6. Asked about his use of the veto, in December, he explained that he was determined to protect the single market and when he was not offered the safeguards he sought he was obliged to veto the embryonic new treaty. He did what in advance he had publicly said he would do; and he had explained his thinking fully to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This account lacks persuasiveness though. He could have protected the single market and the 40 per cent of our exports, which it represents, by participating in the negotiation of a new European Union treaty as a full partner. If he had concluded that there were plans to damage the single market, he could simply have said: "No dice". The amendment of an existing treaty requires unanimity as well as ratification. The single market of 2011 could have been quite simply protected, without need for new" safeguards". Saying "no" might have been unpopular, but it could not have been overridden. European unpopularity should not worry a Eurosceptic.

The "safeguards" which Cameron was seeking were not for the protection of the integrity of the single market, but against upcoming proposals to adopt measures under single market regulation in the field of financial services. Single market regulations are adopted by majority vote, except where they concern taxation. The proposals on the table will, in the British view, severely handicap the London financial market. Cameron was justifiably seeking protection against them - presumably by getting them changed, dropped or, by means of a treaty change made subject to unanimity; like the proposed tax on financial transactions. The colleagues were not prepared to accept the deal, which he offered them. It should be added that the United Kingdom has not so far been outvoted in discussions on financial services.

There was an impression that Cameron had withdrawn his insistence that the intellectual and physical assets of the EU may not be used in the preparation of a new treaty establishing a transfer/stability union. This impression appears to be unfounded. The outcome is that a new treaty will apparently go ahead; the European Council has been given a legal opinion that EU assets can be used for the purpose. And new financial regulation, if any, remains subject to majority vote.