Saturday 12 November 2011

So, the question is In or Out then

Bruno Waterfield has an interesting article in today's Daily Telegraph with the headline "EU turmoil revives calls for referendum". Dealing with the point that it has been confirmed redrafting the treaties to ensure beleaguered economies cannot spend too much as a condition of receiving billions of euros in rescue packages and as that involves a transfer of sovereignty necessitating a referendum in Ireland, Waterfield writes:
"Ministers have stopped saying that they plan to use treaty change to take powers back from the EU. This follows private warnings from Germany that it is not willing to trade eurozone "fiscal union" for British opt-outs."
So, if that is correct, we now know that repatriation of powers is a dead duck - as we all knew it was anyway - and any future referendum in this country would need to be a straight In/Out choice. That solves one headache for David Cameron, however it does leave him with another; namely if he fancied duck for his Christmas lunch it will unfortunately not be "à l'orange" but "à sauerkraut".

Just saying.............

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So it's not really the EU anymore is it?
LETS SAY IT LOUD AND CLEAR, GERMANY CALLING, GERMANY CALLING, YOU WILL OBEY...............WE WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS UND WE WILL TELL YOU THE ANSWERS - IT DOESN'T GET ANY CLEARER THAN THAT DOES IT?

WitteringsfromWitney said...

Anon: Seems a reasonable resumé......

cosmic said...

I wonder how many referendums it will take for the Irish to get the answer right this time?

From the article

"On Wednesday, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, talked with EU officials in Brussels to see if treaty change and calls for popular votes could be averted."

Some liberal, some democrat.

I suspect that privately the Tories are a bit disturbed by the turn events are taking in the EU, but nowhere near enough to deflect them from their renegotiation nonsense and their determination to go along with the EU at any cost.