Cross-Purposes: The Long Road to Brexit

National Review Online, June 28, 2016

The Red Lion, Whitehall, London, March 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Last week, Britons voted themselves out of the European Union, but the seeds of Brexit were planted decades ago.

‘Nothing,” wrote the Duke of Wellington, “except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” The vote for Brexit was a necessary victory. And that it was necessary is a tragedy.

Its origins lay in the fact that many Britons never fully grasped the nature of the European project into which they had been enrolled. They saw it as a trading bloc with extra benefits (and, yes, some annoying costs and meddling regulation). It was a misunderstanding encouraged by those who took the United Kingdom into the “Common Market,” a misunderstanding that left a legacy that bedeviled Britain’s domestic politics and soured the country’s relationship with its European partners.   

The entities that evolved into the European Union were inspired by two world wars within a single generation, and they were about a great deal more than trade. Their most important founding fathers (men like Jean Monnet) believed that the nation-state could not be trusted to keep the peace. What was needed was a post-national federation, not exactly the superstate of sometimes fevered euroskeptic imaginations, but something softer, subtler, and, arguably, more insidious. People liked the nation-states they already had; the post-national would have to be built by the post-democratic. As Monnet anticipated, this was a process that would have to be patient, and, often, oblique (“by zig and by zag”), and that’s how it’s turned out. Piece by piece, swaths of domestic policy-making have been transferred to “Brussels,” safely beyond national democratic control.

Monnet recognized that voters in the six founding members (France, West Germany, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, and Italy) of what eventually became the EU, countries that had known military defeat and occupation, would be reluctant to jettison their nation-states. What then would be the case with Great Britain, a kingdom comfortable, even too comfortable, with its past?

Well, according to one poll, the most important reason given by 49 percent of those who voted last week to quit the EU was that “decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.” That thinking shades, I suspect, into the second-most popular (33 percent) first choice (leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”) and the third (13 percent): Sticking with Brussels would mean being left with no choice “about how the EU expanded its membership or its powers.” The top reasons why Remainers wanted to stay in the EU were primarily economic. Only 9 percent cited “a strong attachment to the EU and its shared history, culture and traditions.” After more than 40 years in the Brussels club, national still trumped post-national.

Some of those who led the U.K. into what were then the European Communities in 1973 understood their true nature. Others convinced themselves that talk of “ever closer union” was grandiloquent continental verbiage, nothing more. The refusal of the English, wrote George Orwell, “to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.”  

Despite the best efforts of more erudite opponents of membership, the debate over whether Britain should join and (after the question was put in a 1975 referendum) then stay in the “Common Market” largely revolved, as that misnomer suggests, around trade and the economy, leaving far too much that needed saying unsaid, an omission with consequences. In the 2013 speech in which he agreed to hold his fateful referendum, David Cameron noted how many Britons were asking “why can’t we just have what we voted to join — a common market?” The problem, of course, was that they had, in reality, voted for something that was very much more than that. Forty years later, the memory of what they thought they had voted for still haunted Britain’s political landscape.

People felt, claimed Cameron, “that the EU is heading in a direction that they never signed up to.” It would have been fair to add (although he didn’t) that British politicians had done their bit to set — or at least go along with — that course. For example, Margaret Thatcher helped push the union toward a greater acceptance of economic liberalism. This led to the EU’s Single Market, a major achievement, but it came with a catch, the Single European Act, a new EU treaty that diluted the veto power of individual member states. Mrs. Thatcher believed that the sacrifice of another slice of sovereignty was worth it. Yet again, economic promise trumped political price. The pace of integration duly picked up: No need to zig or to zag on this occasion.

By the time of her famous speech in Bruges in 1988, the lady was beginning to turn. Brussels was using its expanded powers to pursue an interventionist (and integrationist) agenda that Thatcher did not appreciate. Even so, to reread that speech is to notice that, like so many of her countrymen, she still didn’t get it: “The [European] Community,” she said, was not “an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept.” On the contrary, it was, and it always had been — and there was nothing “abstract” about the “intellectual concept” that underpinned it. “Ever closer union” meant what it said.

The Bruges speech (essentially) set in motion the conflict that toppled first Thatcher and, indirectly, her successor, John Major. Trivialized by the media and opposition as an internal squabble, the “Tory Wars” were the result of a serious attempt by some Conservatives to come to grips with where the European project was going. They were at their bloodiest in the aftermath of Major’s signature of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Maastricht turned the European Communities into the European Union and paved the way for the introduction of a single currency. Major negotiated an exemption from any obligation on Britain to sign up for what would become the euro, at least. But he didn’t use his veto power to try to force through a deal that might have carved out a niche for the U.K. that was more realistically aligned to the aspirations of its people. It was a missed opportunity.

Instead the ratchet of ever closer union had turned again — and a Tory government had helped out. Frustrated by all this, a small euroskeptic group reinvented itself as the United Kingdom Independence Party. One of UKIP’s founders was a Thatcherite commodities’ broker named Farage. Few noticed and fewer cared.

Making matters more difficult for Major, a modernizing Labour party had embraced the EU both as handy post-democratic bulwark against Tory reform and as a branding device: New Labour not Old, united (unlike certain parties) and forward-looking (unlike certain parties). But what Labour had not done — at least to any significant degree — was buy into the integrationist dream. Its interest in the EU was as a cudgel to batter the Tories.

To be sure, Tony Blair was a genuine europhile (he would have taken Britain into the single currency if he could), so it’s perversely appropriate that he accidentally prepared the ground for Brexit, starting with the decision to give the right to work to migrants from the bloc of formerly Communist countries that joined the EU in 2004. Most EU member-states insisted on a transition period. Blair’s Britain did not. The initial estimate was that there would be a net 5–13,000 new arrivals a year. That’s not how it worked out. The cumulative net total is (conservatively) thought to have exceeded 400,000 people between 2004 and 2012, just part of a huge influx of immigrants from elsewhere in the EU and beyond. This played poorly with the U.K.’s working class, and Brussels took the rap. That was partly (I suspect) because — in an era of political correctness — Brits were wary about criticizing immigration from further afield, and partly because the EU’s freedom-of-movement rules meant that EU migrants could only infrequently be turned away. Their numbers were not only large, but, effectively, uncontrollable.

#share#Immigration was the topic that transformed UKIP from (more or a less) a single-issue euroskeptic party to a far more potent force and propelled it into Labour’s old heartlands, territory where it had hitherto rarely been seen. German chancellor Angela Merkel only fueled the fire, whether bungling the migrant crisis last autumn or refusing to cut Cameron some slack on the EU’s immigration rules during his disastrous “renegotiation” earlier this year. The chickens came home to roost on Thursday: Seventy percent of Britain’s skilled working class supported Brexit.

And it was Merkel who pushed through the Lisbon Treaty as a substitute for the EU constitution that had been rejected by referendums in France and Holland, a brutal reminder that the cause of European integration trumped democracy. Britons had also been promised a referendum on that constitution, but the constitution had been killed off before they could vote. When it was (for all practical purposes) revived in the form of the Lisbon Treaty, Blair’s referendum promise was not. To repeat the message: Ever closer union meant ever less democracy. Walking away from a referendum was also a wasted opportunity: It would have been a relatively (compared with what was to come) low-stakes chance for the U.K. (which could have vetoed the treaty) to consider what it wanted from the EU. Oh well. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, signed the treaty, seemingly unconcerned that it reduced Britain’s shrinking ability to block additional integration, a fact that forced more euroskeptics into the “out” camp.

Meanwhile, opposition leader David Cameron had reined in Tory grumbling about the EU. A modernized party had to stop “banging on about Europe,” he said. Divided parties lose. Voters were bored with the issue. Euroskepticism gave a bad impression: It was retrograde, nostalgia tainted with poison. To be sure there was UKIP, but they were “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly,” Cameron said — cranks who were not to be taken seriously. As a political tactic, Cameron’s approach made some sense, at least in the short-term (he became prime minister in 2010), but it alienated euroskeptics still further. And there were more of them than in the past, their number boosted by the crisis in the euro zone, a crisis accompanied by the insistence that the only solution was more Europe, not less. It was a demand made all the more alarming by the British eurofundamentalists who claimed that there could still come a time when the U.K. might adopt the single currency. Britain had its safeguards against that, but would they survive the election of a europhile government?

In 2012 Jacques Delors, one of the European Union’s most distinguished senior statesmen, appeared to accept that Britain and its partners would never agree on what the EU should be. He floated the suggestion that “if the British cannot support the trend towards more integration in Europe, we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis.” He could imagine, he said, “a form such as a European economic area or a free-trade agreement,” and as Conservative MEP Dan Hannan recalled last week, it was not the only such deal being touted. Finally, Brussels was signaling its willingness to try to solve its “British problem” in a constructive and innovative way.

Cameron should have jumped at the opportunity — a get-out-of-jail-free card if ever there was one — but this surprisingly unimaginative politician still believed he could play the game by the old rules, throwing a few scraps to the euroskeptic rabble at home, while continuing with business as usual in Brussels. He even neglected the chance to wring a few concessions out of Britain’s EU partners in exchange for agreeing to a change in the Lisbon Treaty prompted by the euro-zone crisis.

He was wrong to be so complacent. Euroskeptic attitudes were hardening in Britain and with UKIP on the rise, euroskeptics had somewhere to turn. Indeed, it was to head off the UKIP threat to the Tory vote that Cameron committed to the referendum he had never wanted — a referendum he could quite possibly have junked in the event of a renewed coalition government with the eurofundamentalist Liberal Democrats after the 2015 election. But remarkably, the Conservatives won an outright majority. The referendum couldn’t be dodged.

\Then Cameron blew his last best chance. The threat of a pending in/out referendum ought to have given him the leverage to cut a better EU deal for Britain. After all, he presided over the union’s second-largest economy and the U.K. made the third-largest contribution to the EU budget. But his much-vaunted “renegotiation” failed to secure any significant changes. Perhaps, thinking like almost everyone else (including me) that the Brexiteers had no chance of winning, Cameron didn’t press the EU hard enough. Perhaps the EU’s leadership, confident that they too had little to risk, felt that they could get away with tossing no more than a few crumbs London’s way. Or, perhaps, realizing that the Brits would always stand in the way of ever closer union, they no longer cared.

Whatever the reason, Cameron was left with a renegotiation that proved the EU would concede no more to Britain. The rest is history.

Into the O.K. Corral

National Review Online, February 26, 2016

In a new article posted elsewhere on this website, my old friend Rupert Darwall has, with characteristic elegance and precision, dissected some of the issues surrounding Britain’s referendum on its membership of the EU, a vote set for June 23. For anyone interested in what’s at stake (and I appreciate that not everyone on NR’s side of the Atlantic will be), it’s a must-read.

  As Darwall explains, this particular chapter in Britain’s unhappy European union began in 2007, when then–opposition leader David Cameron gave a “cast-iron guarantee” of a referendum on the EU’s notorious Lisbon Treaty. That treaty, another of Angela Merkel’s gifts to the Continent, was a disgrace to democracy, designed to bludgeon through the functional equivalent of the EU’s rejected constitution. Unfortunately, it came into force before Cameron became prime minister. His referendum would have had no legal effect. Being a pragmatic sort, Cameron dropped it.

Cameron could have gotten away with that flip-flop but for a pattern of behavior, both before and after that decision, that gave the entirely fair impression that he neither shared nor even understood euroskeptic concerns. Thus he made clear his irritation with those Conservatives who were “banging on about Europe.” He denounced UKIP, at that time more clearly a tribe of the ex-Tory Right than it is today, as a party of “fruitcakes, loonies or closet racists, mostly,” a slur that backfired badly.

Compounding this — and whatever eurofundamentalists might claim to the contrary — Cameron was generally cooperative in his dealings with the EU, something all too typical of what Darwall accurately describes as the prime minister’s “steady-as-you-go” politics.

But his clubbable approach generated no gratitude in Brussels and fueled mounting suspicion among euroskeptics at home. Darwall writes that if Cameron’s “party had trusted him more on Europe, he would have been better placed to withstand the pressure for [the] referendum” that now lies just ahead. That’s true. It didn’t help him that the increasingly uneasy Tories also felt threatened by a UKIP insurgency that was itself boosted by Cameron’s inability or unwillingness to fight Britain’s corner in Europe. The result was that, in 2013, he had to concede an “in/out” referendum that, if the voters opt for Brexit, could bring his premiership to an end.

Ranging more generally, Darwall argues that “other than the cap on net migration, there is little from the EU that constrains [Cameron’s] policy ambitions for Britain.” There’s quite a bit to that, but it should come with the important qualification that this is true of Cameron’s ambitions. As Darwall notes, in many areas the prime minister’s ideas converge with those of Britain’s European partners. Once those ideas are enacted into law at the EU level, they are nearly impossible to repeal. A future Tory prime minister, more interested in the free market and, say, scientific realism (Cameron is a climate warrior), will find such faits accomplis very frustrating indeed. With the EU in an increasingly dirigiste mood, that poisonous legacy will only get worse.

But all this is, in a sense, a sideshow, ignoring, as Darwall puts it, “the nine-tenths of the iceberg below the surface”:

How can a Union on the path to becoming a full-fledged political union — what the agreement Mr. Cameron secured in Brussels at the weekend calls “further political integration into the European Union” — accommodate a large nation that is on a diverging path?

It cannot. The EU is what it is, and what it is is a machine grinding relentlessly in the direction of “ever closer union,” a phrase that is both aspirational and of profound legal and institutional consequence. Allowing exemptions from the EU’s forward march — such as those releasing Britain and Denmark from the obligation to sign up for the euro — grows more difficult by the year and needs, well, “cast-iron” legal protection of the type that Cameron has notably failed to secure in his current “renegotiation” with the rest of the EU.

That’s why Cameron’s deal largely covers what Darwall rightly dubs “second-order issues.” The British prime minister desperately wanted his country to stay in the EU, but he had to give the euroskeptic hordes something. Because of the nature of the EU, “second-order” was all that could ever be on offer. The result, fears Darwall, is a distraction, a package that enables Cameron “to trap euroskeptics in a manufactured choice when the real one is still over the horizon.”

In a way, that’s too pessimistic. The deal Cameron has struck is so feeble that, at best, all it can do is give a hand to waverers wanting an excuse to vote to remain in the EU. That’s not nothing, but the deal will not be center stage other than as comic relief. Rather, the debate will probably slide out from underneath Cameron’s control and into more important territory. On the euroskeptic side it will be focused on Britain’s regaining control of more of its own destiny, not least where immigration is concerned.

For their part, those looking to persuade Brits to rally behind the status quo will also, I suspect, move rapidly away from Cameron’s sad surrender and concentrate instead on the underlying case for continued membership of the EU. There will be happy talk of travel, peace, and free trade, but the key message will be negative: Leaving the EU is, they will warn, a leap in the dark, risky at the best of times, utter madness now.

Aided by the fact that Brexiteers have so far failed to unify around an easily grasped, unfrightening alternative to membership in the EU (such as the variant of the “Norwegian option” long advocated by EU Referendum’s Richard North), fear will prevail. Brits will stick with the EU, the devil they know.

That will be a tragedy, and that is the trap this referendum really represents. Darwall eloquently highlights the danger that the EU represents to British democracy. And he frets that “Mr. Cameron’s small-bore approach — asking for little and getting less — stores up problems for the future by fostering the impression that a vote in June to remain in the EU settles the matter of Britain’s relationship with Europe.” My worry, by contrast, is that that impression is correct: The vote will settle the question.

Darwall reckons that the “tensions inherent in Britain’s EU membership will remain” even after the vote to stay in that he expects. So they will. Where we differ is over Darwall’s obvious belief that they will count for something. He thinks that “Mr. Cameron’s referendum will not be the end of the story.” But my guess is that, for all practical purposes, it will. Euroskeptics are an aging segment of the electorate. Absent some truly major convulsion shaking the EU into reopening its core treaty for discussion, this vote is their last good shot at Brexit. And they are likely to miss.

‘Polishing Poo’: Cameron’s Dirty Deal with the EU

National Review Online, February 10, 2016

To pull a rabbit out of a hat, there has to be a hat. In a speech in January 2013, British prime minister David Cameron promised to negotiate a fundamental reworking of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. There would then be a referendum to decide whether Brits wanted to quit the union or stick with it to enjoy the “new settlement” Cameron had secured. There was bold, delusional, or dishonest (take your pick, I’ll go for dishonest) talk of strengthening the EU’s “democratic legitimacy,” of opting out of the forced march toward “ever closer union,” of power “flowing back” to the member states, of an increased role for national parliaments. Euroskeptics scoffed. They were right to. There was no hat. The EU is what it is, and what it is not is some sort of super-free-trade zone: If Cameron got what he wanted, it would no longer be the EU. The rest of the EU was never going to go along with that.

And, now, three years later, the EU’s “president,” Donald Tusk, is brandishing a draft deal that makes that all too clear. Mr. Cameron doesn’t seem too fussed. Many Britons have identified Tusk’s settlement for the malevolent nothing that it is, but their prime minister is insisting that the rabbit that they don’t see is in fact there. He is, he explains, on the edge of winning a splendid new deal for Britain.

It’s customary at times like this to drag out tired old analogies with poor Neville Chamberlain, so notoriously swindled by a wily foreigner at Munich, but that comparison doesn’t work here. No one has swindled Cameron, but if he sells this deal, he will have swindled his country.

In that speech three years ago, Cameron noted how many Britons were asking, “Why can’t we just have what we voted to join — a common market?” Well, that was what they were told they were joining. But what the U.K. actually signed up for was very different — and infinitely less benign.

Yes, “common market” was indeed what Brits used to call that mysterious structure run out of Brussels, but that was a label that concealed more than it explained. In joining what were then more accurately known as the European Communities, Britain had committed itself not only to a trade pact, but also to ever closer union. And that was a project that had been grinding on for a long time. The institutional machinery was already in place to ensure that the integration process — and with it the continuous and irreversible transfer of powers away from national democracies — only moved forward.

And that has continued. The pace may not have been certain, but the direction always was. The changes that David Cameron talked about in 2013 (and before then) were not mere technicalities. They were aimed at the essence of what the European Union, the intended graveyard of the nation-state, was supposed to be. The fact that Cameron wanted quite a few of these changes to be for the benefit of all the EU’s members made things worse still. They were not only a challenge to Brussels but to the euro-fundamentalist political class across a wide swathe of the EU. To repeat myself: The idea that Cameron would secure the unanimous agreement of Britain’s European “partners” to this (because that’s what would, under EU rules, be required) was nonsense.

Cameron, no fool, must have known this, but he was playing a different game. The referendum had essentially been forced on him by the threat to the Tories posed by UKIP’s euroskeptic insurgency. The “renegotiation” would buy valuable time to safely (fingers crossed!) see him through the 2015 election. If it turned out to be a dud, well, he would sort out the problem then.

And a dud is what it has turned out to be

One Tory MP described the proposed deal as “a slap in the face for Britain.” More like a punch, I’d say, made more vicious by the contempt for the electorate with which it was landed: “Hand on heart,” boasted Cameron, “I have delivered the commitments made in my manifesto.” Hand on heart . . . 

Meanwhile, he did his best to stifle dissent within a Conservative party in which many were startled by Cameron’s interpretation of what they had naïvely believed was their manifesto, too.

Speaking in the House of Commons, another Conservative MP, Steve Baker, commented that the deal looked and smelt “funny.” “It might be superficially shiny on the outside, but poke it and it’s soft in the middle.” He asked the prime minister whether he would admit to having “been reduced to polishing poo?”

Cameron wouldn’t, but, dung or not, his renegotiation was always going to be a dud. Bit by bit, he had dropped or diluted his demands. The grand constitutional rearrangements were shelved and the EU’s job-destroying social legislation was left untouched. The tough talk of regaining at least some meaningful veto rights over immigration into the U.K. from elsewhere in the EU dwindled (mostly) into snarling about welfare benefits, a telling retreat. The surge of EU migrants into the U.K. (currently running at a net 180,000 people per year) has done much to fuel British euroskepticism, but Cameron was compelled to accept that he could only nibble at its edges. The free movement of people within the EU is one of the union’s fundamental principles: It wasn’t something that was going to be bartered away.

Cameron ended up asking for little. He will receive less. Thus, so far as benefits are concerned, his proposed scaling back of “in-work” benefits for EU migrants has itself been scaled back. Even that only kicks in if Britain applies an “emergency brake” in the event of undue pressure on public services or the welfare system. And who decides whether the conditions for applying that emergency brake have been met? The EU Commission. Ah.

To be fair, the Commission has said that those conditions are met in Britain — for now.

Wait, there’s more.

The definition of those EU citizens that the U.K. can turn away on the grounds that they represent a “present” threat to public policy or security will be broadened. That’s a welcome change, but it does nothing to address the way European human-rights legislation — all too often stretched beyond reasonable interpretation — can stand in the way of the deportation of equally undesirable non-EUcitizens. Cameron once undertook to tackle this, too. (No matter that doing anything about it was — for reasons too complicated to go into here — a legal impossibility as long as Britain remained within the EU.) He gave up on that as well.

Meanwhile, the introduction of a “red card” system that would, under certain circumstances, allow national parliaments to block EU legislation is one of the few “constitutional” reforms to survive, but it would require the support of another 14 national parliaments before it could be played. The chances of that ever happening are, to say the least, remote.

Another area of British concern has been that the nine EU countries — including the U.K. — not in the euro zone might be ganged up upon by the 19 who are. So, if enough of the nine (it’s not indicated how many) get together, they will be allowed to give their “reasoned objection” to measures designed to integrate the euro zone further. How kind! These objections will then be “discuss[ed]” with a view to finding a “satisfactory solution.” And if that can’t be found, well, silence.

More helpfully, it’s confirmed that Britain will not have to contribute to future euro-zone bailouts, and there will be some protections for Britain’s financial sector from euro-zone regulators. There will also be a prohibition against discrimination against individuals and entities based on the fact that the member-state where they are established has not adopted the single currency, something that will, again, please the City.

Then there’s “ever closer union,” that lethal ratchet. Cameron has been handed a few words, of limited legal consequence, to the effect that the U.K. “is not committed to further political integration into the European Union,” whatever that might mean. But nothing direct is said about the European Court and its habit of interpreting EU law in a way that takes “ever closer union” as a guiding principle. This matters: In the event of a conflict between European law and the law of any member state (including Britain’s), European law prevails. As long as the EU is the EU, that, too, is not going to change.

Is the deal even binding? At the moment it’s only a draft. There will be more bargaining to come, but this proposal, or something close to it, will probably be agreed to by all the EU’s leaders, conceivably as early as next week. Once that’s happened, it can (arguably) be reversed only by a unanimous vote. Once filed with the United Nations, it is (arguably) also binding under international law.

Arguably: With the EU the devil is always in the details, and the law in this area is decidedly murky. The deal will commit the EU’s leadership to amend the EU’s secondary legislation to reflect what has been agreed, a procedure that will give the EU’s (reliably euro-fundamentalist) parliament an opportunity to weigh in. And if it declines to sign off on the deal, what then? After all, the British will have already voted.

Tusk also accepts that the EU treaties may “possibly” need amending at some (unspecified) point to reflect “a few elements” in the proposed deal. Forget that “possibly.” The word is “certainly,” and the amendments may have to cover more than a “few” elements. Amending the treaty is a lengthy, rarely straightforward business, requiring the agreement of all 28 member-states. If that’s not forthcoming — if a parliament votes it down, say, or a referendum gets in the way — what then? It’s by no means clear that Tusk’s agreement to agree would have the legal force that he and Cameron claim. Again, this would take place after (maybe years after) the British referendum, which may take place as early as June.

So, what’s a Brit to think? Well, even on the most favorable construction, the deal does next to nothing to restore Britain’s control over its borders, next to nothing to return any powers to its parliament, next to nothing to extricate Britain from the jaws of “ever closer union,” and nothing at all to restore supremacy to its courts. Adding insult to injury, what’s been thrown the country’s way are, for the most part, not even scraps but promises of scraps, promises that may well not be binding.

Apart from that, it’s a great deal. Hand on heart.

Cameron and the Euroskeptics

The Weekly Standard, February 11, 2013

David Cameron leaves things late. Leadership by essay crisis, it has been called, a nod to procrastination by generations of students. But his belated response to the mounting political turmoil over Britain’s membership in the EU​—​a speech proposing an in/out referendum​—​won’t save him from disaster in the 2015 general election.

Some early responses were encouraging​—​outrage from EU parliamentarians, a disapproving Obama administration, cries of good riddance in France, and, according to one grandee, “shock” in Davos​—​but British voters were not so easily taken in. Polls showed the Conservatives trailing Labour by a little less, mainly on the back of a few percentage points grabbed from the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party, but Cameron’s speech was no game-changer. UKIP still stood at around 10 percent. UKIP, which largely draws its support from the right, took just 3 percent of the vote in 2010, but that was enough to cost the Tories some 20 seats​—​and an overall majority.

That’s the math forcing Cameron to call for a referendum he had always opposed. With his own (largely euroskeptic) Conservatives mutinous, UKIP polling in the teens, the economy faltering, and 2015 drawing closer, something had to be done. Cameron’s calculation was straightforward. With no other establishment party (for now) backing a referendum, and with UKIP (thanks to Britain’s first-past-the-post system) having little prospect of winning a parliamentary seat, let alone forming a government, the Tories are tempting euroskeptics with the only chance of the in-or-out showdown for which they have been pining. By contrast, voting UKIP in 2015 would divide the euroskeptic vote, help (europhile) Labour and the (euromaniacal) Liberal Democrats, and risk throwing that opportunity away.

The referendum timetable has been organized to underline that point. Nothing much will happen for now. Instead, Cameron will go to the polls in 2015 with a request for a mandate “to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners.” Once those negotiations have been concluded there will be a “referendum [in 2017, most likely] with a very simple in or out choice.” The referendum is thus dependent on Cameron’s reelection: Vote for him, or the nation-state gets it.

That so many UKIP supporters have yet to be won over is, to a degree, a reflection of the way the party has become an expression of broader popular discontent with the liberal status quo. UKIP is “about” more than the EU. But there’s something else: On closer inspection Cameron’s proposal looks less than convincing, and that’s even if we ignore the fact that his chances of victory in 2015 are on the order of a snowball in hell, or Romney in California.

There is a credible way for the U.K. to exit the EU (it involves Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty; I’ll spare you the technicalities), but Cameron’s “negotiations” are not it. Anything involving the repatriation of enough powers to impress enough euroskeptics would need a new treaty to be agreed on by each EU country, a tall order for reasons that are both practical (there are currently 27 member states) and philosophical. The EU is driven by the idea of “ever closer union,” a process that only moves in one direction. Once a competence has been transferred from the national level to the EU it cannot​—​must not​—​be handed back. Were Britain to win an exception to this principle, it would make a shambles of what the EU is meant to be. “Europe,” warned the EU’s prominenti, is not “à la carte.” Britain was either in or, well, the rest was left unsaid by just about everyone other than the French.

Cameron understands this. He has framed his proposed negotiations​—​they should be part of a wider effort to create “a leaner, less bureaucratic union”​—​in a way designed to address this concern. If the broader Brussels menu could be made more attractive, Britain would need fewer special orders. Given the rhetoric in Berlin (sometimes), Stockholm, Prague, and elsewhere in the EU’s north and east in favor of Britain’s more free market tack, this is an approach that ought to make sense.

But talk is cheap. When it comes to actually doing something to reduce the Brussels deadweight, the EU’s more economically liberal governments typically fall silent, still in thrall to the European dream to which most Britons​—​who were told they were joining a “common market”​—​have never subscribed. And when Cameron asks for support for a less dirigiste treaty, that dream (or nightmare) will stand in his way. For once negotiations start, where will they end? After all, the EU’s electorates are restless, and profoundly divided about what they want from “Europe.”

Within hours of Cameron’s speech, a leading member of Angela Merkel’s party was talking darkly about the dangers of opening “Pandora’s box,” a comment then echoed across the continent by a cast of characters that included the finance minister of the crumbling Hellenic Republic, Pandora’s repeatedly bailed-out basket case, sternly warning of the dangers of renegotiations, a performance that would suggest that chutzpah as well as cynic is a word with roots in ancient Greek.

Cameron may be gambling that the euro’s problems will force that box open regardless. National politicians sucked into the eurozone’s drama will keep trying to bypass the need for treaty revision and its awkward requirement of unanimity (as they did with the 2012 Fiscal Compact, which is formally a side-agreement) in their efforts to fix the currency union. But the far deeper integration that this repair work must eventually entail (and for which the Brussels bureaucracy is pushing) cannot be achieved without it. Amending the treaty would require British consent, and that could be Cameron’s moment. The U.K. would never be expected to opt into any EU “core,” but the price of doing nothing to impede its formation ought to be agreement to the sort of looser association that most Brits would anyway prefer over a clean divorce.

That’s how this story could work out, but it relies on improbable contingencies, stretched assumptions, and tightly crossed fingers. Many euroskeptics​—​even if they could be persuaded that Cameron has a shot at victory in 2015​—​would not regard that conclusion as a happy ending. What they want is a clean break. What they fear is that even the half-decent second-best solution​—​a looser association​—​will not be what it could be thanks to David Cameron. He may be frustrated by the EU, but he doesn’t have the imagination to risk anything approaching separation.

What, I suspect, they anticipate is that he won’t even get that chance, that the eurozone will struggle on as is, and that Cameron will be thrown a few scraps at the end of pantomime negotiations, which he will then declare to have been a triumph. This will set the stage for a referendum in which a misled, there-is-no-alternative British public will vote for the “yes” for which Cameron has already declared​—​an odd thing to do ahead of any negotiations​—that he will campaign “heart and soul.” That is not the language, and these are not the scenarios, designed to reassure euroskeptic hearts, minds, or even souls in time for 2015.

Europe, Bloody Europe

The Weekly Standard, August 13, 2012

It’s always bloody Europe. It was Europe (specifically, Tory splits over Britain’s relationship with the EU) that finally did in Mrs. Thatcher, and it did in poor John Major too. Now it is beginning to look like David Cameron might eventually go the same way, felled by the issue he has tried to dodge since becoming party leader in 2005. To borrow his phrase from the following year, “banging on” about Brussels was over. Saving the planet was in.

But the elephant was still in the room, increasingly intrusive, increasingly destructive, and increasingly unwanted. Britons have never truly warmed to the EU, but a 2009 poll showing that more than half of them wanted out was just one more sign that resigned exasperation was at last giving way to something more determined. With the economic crisis drawing attention away from the Conservatives’ divisive past and onto the ruling Labour party’s dismal present, some carefully calibrated Brussels bashing would have been a smart way for Cameron both to score points against a notoriously europhile government and, no less important, to calm a restive (and euroskeptic) Conservative base dismayed by their leader’s often clumsy attempts to reboot the party’s image. It was an opportunity Cameron largely ignored, preferring to stay in his comfort zone and sing the old tunes that had worked so well. Carbon menace!

Many voters weren’t impressed. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the euroskeptic—and distinctly maverick—UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence party) beat Labour into second place behind the Tories, grabbing 16.5 percent of the vote, up a sliver from the already remarkable 16.1 percent scooped up in 2004. It was a humiliation for Labour but a warning for the Conservatives. Less than 12 months before a crucial general election, the Tories who had flocked to UKIP’s side had not come home. A commitment from Cameron to hold a referendum on the EU’s pending Lisbon Treaty—if he was elected before it was in force—reassured few. Rightly so: The treaty came into effect ahead of the election. The Conservatives dropped their referendum.

It may be a coincidence that it was from roughly this point that the Tories struggled to retain a clear lead at the polls. What cannot be denied is that UKIP won enough votes in enough constituencies to deprive the Conservatives of an absolute majority in the 2010 general election. Rather than shoot for a minority government (the bolder, better course), Cameron opted for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the most europhile of all Britain’s major parties. The irony was obvious. The self-inflicted wound has taken a little longer to become visible.

With the keys to 10 Downing Street so close, Cameron’s choice can perhaps be forgiven. The same cannot be said of his reluctance to take a more aggressively euroskeptic tack in the years that have followed. The constraints of coalition have something to do with it, naturally, as do memories of earlier Tory disaster. Nevertheless, with the woes of the euro—a dangerous experiment lauded by many in the Labour party and by the Liberal Democrats—both unnerving the electorate and vindicating those squabbling Conservatives, it ought to be a time to make hay. But that’s not what Cameron has done.

And the chances thrown away may not just be domestic. As things stand, the currency union’s nervous breakdown offers the only remotely realistic prospect of a successful renegotiation of the U.K.’s position in the EU along lines that most Britons, including (he claims) Cameron, really want—to remain in the club, but less so. That’s because any credible long-term fix for the eurozone is likely to involve amendments to the EU’s governing treaty. That would need the approval of all member states including the U.K. That in turn might give Cameron the leverage he would need to secure all the other member states’ agreement to the treaty changes that would be required to accommodate the U.K.’s EU lite.

It’s not going to happen. Holding the global financial system ransom (and that’s how it would be portrayed) is a gamble too far, particularly for the prime minister of the country that hosts that hub of international finance, the City of London, and even more so when that same prime minister is unwilling to risk a breach with his Liberal Democrat partners.

It’s possible—just—to see the current approach as one of accidentally masterful inactivity. If the 17 eurozone countries are permitted to merge into a politically united core within a broader “multi-speed” EU, that could leave Britain to its own devices in a more congenial outer-EU. But you’d have to be very naïve to believe in such an outcome. All 27 EU countries would still be trapped within a European project that is explicitly set up to grind relentlessly forward (“ever closer union”). The speeds might differ, the direction would not.

If that’s to change, there will have to be treaty changes of the type that Cameron, pleading crisis and coalition, has not begun to attempt to renegotiate or, for that matter, even design. To be fair, his government has passed legislation designed to subject any future significant transfer of powers to Brussels to a referendum, a step almost unthinkable a few years ago. It was a start (and one day it may trigger a necessary confrontation), but the suspicion with which the new law was greeted by euroskeptics (because of the loopholes lurking within it) was yet another sign of how estranged Cameron has become from those who should be his party’s natural supporters.

That estrangement has been sharpened by a series of recent blunders. One of the biggest was an effort last October to browbeat Tory MPs into voting against a largely symbolic motion calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU. The motion had no hope of passing, but Cameron’s rather telling overreaction helped provoke a massive revolt within his parliamentary party, a revolt that goes some way to explaining the prime minister’s decision to keep the U.K. out of the fiscal pact cooked up by Merkel and Sarkozy in December.

The goodwill generated by that faint flicker of the bulldog spirit has since been squandered with characteristic carelessness of euroskeptic sensibilities. Cameron may have respectable, even euroskeptic, reasons for rejecting a referendum just now, but to argue (as his spokesman did in June) that there was “no popular support” for an immediate referendum at a time when half the voters were telling the pollsters they wanted just that (another third wanted one “in the next few years”) was not only inaccurate but, politically speaking, nuts: Cameron is lucky that Labour remains unenthusiastic about such a vote.

Even nuttier, and much more damaging, was his subsequent observation that he would “never” campaign for the U.K. to quit the EU. Again, there can be good reasons for a “practical euroskeptic” (as Cameron styles himself) to oppose an in/out referendum, not least the danger that, faced with a stark decision (made, doubtless, to seem even starker by big business), the electorate might well “keep ahold of nurse / For fear of finding something worse.” Read that way, opposition to such a vote is a question of tactics, not principle.

But by going further—and in such categorical terms—Cameron shredded the shreds of his euroskeptic credibility for no evident reward other than, perhaps, a smattering of the bien-pensant applause he treasures for reasons, sadly, other than cynical political calculation. How now was he supposed to be able to renegotiate a better deal with the EU? With the threat of a British withdrawal removed (quite a few EU countries still want the U.K. to stick around) and the idea of vetoing closer eurozone integration long off the table, it’s unclear what cards the prime minister would have left to play. “Practical” euroskepticism looks to be not so very practical after all.

The inescapable logic, for euroskeptics, points to an in/out referendum, followed, in the event of an “out” vote, by a total recasting of Britain’s relationship with Brussels, as the country begins the withdrawal process provided for under the EU treaty. That’s not what they will get. The best guess, amongst a bewildering range of scenarios, is that at the next general election (due in 2015) the Conservatives will guarantee a referendum on whatever feeble deal Cameron, reelected and freed from the chains of coalition, might (fingers crossed) manage to extract from the EU. Will that lure enough UKIP Tories back to the fold?

It’s unlikely, not least because there will probably be more of them than in 2010 (the 2014 elections to the European Parliament should add to UKIP’s momentum). The chances of a Conservative majority in 2015 thus appear (in the absence of an intervening economic miracle) slight. Instead the odds must be that Labour will be back in power, in which case there will be no renegotiations with Brussels, and that will be that.

What was that slogan about a roach motel?