Cool reception for Cameron’s EU reform plans

UK insists reform blueprint could be implemented without changing EU treaties.

The question of how to reform the European Union and of how the United Kingdom might fit in such a reformed Union dominated the debate in the European Parliament’s constitutional-affairs committee this week. Plans for EU reform laid out by David Cameron, the UK prime minister, in a newspaper article at the weekend and conveyed to the committee by David Lidington, Britain’s Europe minister, got a cool reception by MEPs.

Lidington told MEPs on Monday (17 March) that far-reaching reform of the EU was in the interest of all member states and that Cameron’s proposals should not be seen simply as demands from the UK. Cameron’s Conservatives, currently in coalition with the EU-friendly Liberal Democrats, are facing a general election that has to take place by May next year.

Lidington stressed those elements of Cameron’s reform blueprint that could be implemented without changing the EU’s treaties. “Pretty much everything to do with competitiveness you can do without altering the treaty,” he said. “You can deepen the single market, forge free-trade agreements, insist that European-level regulation is business-friendly.”

Lidington also urged the European Commission to take the objections of national parliaments made under the Lisbon treaty’s ‘yellow card’ procedure more seriously – another measure that does not require treaty change. The Commission has an obligation to review a legislative proposal if one-third of national parliaments object to it within eight weeks of the proposal’s publication, although the procedure does not oblige the Commission to withdraw or alter its proposal.

Eleven national parliaments, including the UK’s, last year opposed the Commission’s proposal to create a European public prosecutor because in their view it violated the EU’s principle of subsidiarity, the notion that the EU should legislate only where necessary. But in November, the Commission decided to press ahead with the proposal without making changes, a decision that has split the member states and thrown the legislative procedure into disarray.

Lidington said that he had been “very disappointed” by the Commission’s response to recent objections from member states’ parliaments, and that this proved that the procedure needs to be changed. He said that the eight-week period during which a ‘yellow card’ has to be triggered should be made longer and that objections should be possible not only for reasons of subsidiarity, as is currently the case, but also for reasons of proportionality.

Turning to the highly charged issue of immigration, Lidington stressed that the UK was not challenging the freedom of movement enshrined in the EU’s treaties but that this freedom was not unqualified, and that in principle only those EU citizens with jobs or seriously looking for jobs should be allowed to settle in another member state. He indirectly conceded that this principle is well established in the EU’s legal regime, which allows various restrictions on the freedom of movement of EU citizens, for example when they are a burden for the host country.

“In some respects we are actually now bringing our practice in line with the practice that other member states have followed for some time,” Lidington said.

György Schöpflin, a centre-right Hungarian MEP who has spent decades in the UK, said that Cameron was seeking to “exclude” labour from the EU’s single market when in fact the free movement of people, goods, services and capital were all interlinked. “What I don’t understand is how you can take out labour and cannot accept that these four elements work together,” he said.

Click Here: NRL Telstra Premiership