Saturday, November 02, 2019

All Souls Brexit

Lionel Barber in the FT with a brilliant reflection on Brexit; one highlight --

Several Eurocrats interviewed for this article agreed that the Brussels summit in December 2011 marked a turning point for British diplomacy. France and Germany were battling to secure agreement on a “fiscal compact” to buttress the eurozone after the global financial crisis. In the early hours of the morning, Cameron, without forewarning, produced demands to protect the City of London and threatened a veto if he was rebuffed. European leaders, including Merkel, were outraged. They saw this as a domestic gambit to appease Eurosceptics on a matter of singular importance to eurozone members. So they simply ignored Cameron and secured an agreement among themselves, outside the EU treaties. The UK’s bluff had been called.

One implication of this is that the 2012 Irish referendum to ratify the fiscal compact -- needed precisely because it was outside the EU treaties -- was a bigger deal than perhaps realized at the time. If that referendum had failed, Cameron would have been rescued from his isolationist stance on the compact and the momentum towards his own doomed Brexit referendum would have slowed. 

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