While never a believer that Britain should leave the EU, I was genuinely angry about the way our country was being treated. I used the first Prime Minister’s Questions in autumn 2007, after Gordon Brown had bottled the election, to raise the issue. ‘The prime minister said that the Labour manifesto was an issue of trust,’ I said. ‘That manifesto promised a referendum on the European Constitution. Do you understand how not holding that referendum damages your credibility?’ I would keep up the pressure all the way through to the moment Brown himself signed the Lisbon Treaty and passed the legislation through the UK Parliament. As described in Chapter 10, from that moment a referendum on the treaty alone, as I’d hoped for, was no longer a viable option.
When it came to our own manifesto for the 2010 election, we did think seriously about including a pledge for a referendum. Oliver Letwin particularly pushed for one. But because Lisbon had been ratified, it would run the risk of turning into an in/out vote. The EU could legitimately argue that every Parliament, including our own, had ratified Lisbon, and so a referendum to reject it was effectively a call to leave.
George argued powerfully that this wasn’t the time: ‘We are going into an election after the biggest financial crisis in our history, and people will say, “That’s your answer – a referendum on Europe.”’ It would be 2001 all over again: a Conservative ‘Keep the Pound’ campaign in an election about the NHS. So instead, the referendum lock came in its place.
In a stable and unchanging EU, that probably would have been sufficient. The referendum lock – no powers could be passed from Westminster to Brussels without the express agreement of the British people in a referendum – was the ultimate expression of the ‘thus-far-and-no-further’ policy. The British people would have an absolute lock on any proposed changes. But a stable EU wasn’t on offer, particularly as the Eurozone crisis took hold.
There was the Greek crisis, where we had to fight to stay out of bailing out a country that was suffering dreadfully, in part from its membership of the euro, even though we weren’t part of the currency bloc.
And there were the treaty changes that came out of Brussels and had to be ratified by us (with the aim of easing the Eurozone crisis) even though, after Lisbon, the EU had promised that there would be no further constitutional changes.
Ivan Rogers, my adviser on Europe from 2011 to 2013 and later our top diplomat in Brussels, has written about how the decision to hold a referendum stemmed from the Eurozone crisis and centred on whether our place inside the EU but outside the Eurozone could be made sustainable in the light of the changes that were having to be made. The biggest single moment on the journey was the veto and its aftermath described above: clear evidence for the proposition that Britain’s place in the EU needed fixing.
All the while, the public concern about being caught up in it all – through bailouts and the like – strengthened support in the country for a referendum.
The depth of the Eurozone crisis made it likely – at times it seemed almost inevitable – that more fundamental treaty change would soon be contemplated. The southern countries wanted more solidarity; the northern ones tougher rules on delivery of structural reforms to improve competitiveness. Major changes couldn’t be fixed within the current framework. So surely it was also the right moment to find a settlement for the UK, and confirm it through a popular vote.
Indeed, that is how I explained it to officials. I was bringing forward something that would have happened regardless. When the inevitable new treaty came, the lock would have kicked in and meant we’d have to hold a referendum – and the pressure for an in/out one would be huge. Our national interests meant we’d want to push for reform of the EU and renegotiate our place within it.
But the referendum pledge was also about what had gone before. One after the other, these changes led to a moment of reckoning for the UK and EU. Indeed, you can join the dots from Maastricht to Lisbon to the euro crisis and my veto – and there is a relatively straight line towards renegotiation and referendum.
That was intensified by something else. Because while there was a practical problem building in the relationship between Britain and the EU, I accept that there was also major party political pressure over the issue at home. My parliamentary party was becoming increasingly restive about the failure to hold a referendum in the past and the need for one in future.
I make no apology for paying close attention to the views of Conservative MPs. That is how our political system works. A prime minister serves while he or she retains the confidence of Parliament. Parliament represents the people.
One of the arguments made against having a referendum is that it was all about managing the parliamentary party. Yet the very same people who make that argument also complain that we shouldn’t have referendums because we are a parliamentary democracy. They do not appear to realise that these points are directly contradictory. In a parliamentary democracy, the leader of a parliamentary group has to pay attention to the views of that group. And that group was pressing for a referendum. So holding the EU referendum was not a rejection of parliamentary democracy, it arose out of it.
And what about the argument that the MPs were cut off from their constituents who did not want a referendum? In other words, that the vote came from obsessional Tories out of touch with the public – it arose from Parliament, but from a Parliament that had lost the plot.
I have one simple response to this. People voted to leave. They voted in unprecedented numbers. You simply cannot deny that there was democratic pressure for this vote. You might be able to argue that the AV referendum was a bit of political management that didn’t engage the public. You can’t say that about the EU referendum.
The political pressure to hold a referendum was strong and growing. There was even a risk that Labour would use the turmoil in Europe to leapfrog us and protect its relatively weak flank on Europe by proposing one themselves.
And of course there was UKIP. UKIP’s role in the formulation of the referendum pledge tends to be overstated. As I mentioned in Chapter 24, I started seriously mulling over the possibility of a referendum in January 2012. At that point UKIP was still a small force. Polling showed it regularly on less than 5 per cent, and it was less popular than the Lib Dems.
Yet I did see the attraction of UKIP to Tory voters as an indication of public feeling. And I also thought that if UKIP came first in the May 2014 EU parliamentary elections (when they would receive a higher profile and were more likely to perform well), the pressure to pledge a referendum would be too great to resist – rather as I saw the SNP victory as a mandate for the referendum it was calling for. That was undoubtedly an additional incentive to move before being forced to do so.
The truth is that all of these issues – the potential rise of UKIP, the difficulties of managing the Conservative Party, the need for a compelling and popular policy offer on Europe at the next election – were concerns of mine. But they were not the determining force that led to the referendum pledge.
If it was only about managing the party, I could have come up with a formulation for a different sort of referendum, rather than the full in/out version. A nationwide plebiscite asking for a fundamental change in Britain’s relationship with Europe – a so-called ‘mandate referendum’ – was popular at the time with some of the party’s leading Eurosceptics. Many of my MPs would have been happy with any pledge as long as it involved a nationwide referendum on the issue of Europe. If it was all about not being outflanked by the opposition, I could have waited for Labour to make a move and then neutralised it with a pledge of my own.
And it is worth remembering that all these party-political considerations were brought about by a simple fact. The British public were becoming increasingly concerned about the direction that the EU was taking. Trust in the EU fell across the continent after the euro crisis began, but nowhere more than in Britain, where it plummeted from -13 per cent to -49 per cent in just fi
ve years. This reflected a broader trend: according to the British Attitudes Survey, after 1997 the proportion of the British people favouring a reduction of the EU’s powers or an exit altogether was always above ٥٠ per cent. So I wasn’t responding to Conservative Euroscepticism so much as to British Euroscepticism.
And I thought it was important to respond. The proposition that we needed to settle Britain’s relationship with Europe was bolstered by the argument that when it came to consent for what was happening, politicians had kicked this can down the road for far too long. The broken promises on referendums. The changes to the powers of the EU without the explicit backing of the British people. The fact that with the euro the organisation that we were part of was changing before our eyes.
Those who say now that it was wrong to hold the referendum are arguing, in effect, that it would have been better for the country to have been forced to continue down a road it didn’t want to take, and which we couldn’t turn back from, having never been asked to make the judgement.
So I am not apologetic about having been the prime minister who promised a referendum and delivered on the promise. I couldn’t foresee a possible future for the UK without a referendum – and I thought it right to hold one and try to win the argument. I deeply regret my failure to do so and the consequences that have followed. But that’s not the same thing as believing that the whole attempt was misguided. I strongly believe that it wasn’t.
I also don’t accept that I was appeasing populism. In fact, I was confronting it head-on. And far from holding the views of Eurosceptics in disdain, I shared a lot of their dissatisfaction. The EU had become too big and too bossy. Our current position was becoming unsustainable. The democratic deficit was increasingly intolerable. I knew we were better staying in: what happened in the EU would still affect us, whether we were in or out; better that we were at the table, having our say. The veto incident had made me even more convinced of that, but had also sold to me the pressing need for reform.
Ultimately, I thought the choice about whether or not to stay in a reformed Europe was bigger than one politician or indeed one Parliament. It was for the people to decide. That’s what brought me to recording on tape in January 2012 that I was now seriously considering this strategy.
So what about getting my team on board?
Oliver Letwin was still strongly in favour. In fact, in May 2012 he sent me a note saying it was time to discuss the matter of a referendum seriously. As Europe split into the Euro-ins and Euro-outs, he said, we should be rallying the Euro-outs. I agreed with him that it was crunch time, but I thought this was going to be far from a team effort. ‘Every time Europe has a tremor, the calls for “more Europe” come from the familiar quarters and we seem to be the only ones objecting,’ I wrote back.
William had become more pro-EU since becoming foreign secretary, but he was still of similar thinking to me. It’s been said that he and I decided on the referendum over pizzas at Chicago Airport after the NATO summit in May 2012. Not true. We did discuss the subject at a pizza restaurant on that trip, but it was a discussion, not a decision. There would be many, many discussions over the months. We certainly wouldn’t have finalised something like that without George being there.
It’s been widely reported that George was opposed to the strategy. That’s true, and he still says to me now, ‘I told you not to do that fucking referendum.’ But it’s more complicated than that. He was one of the first to raise the need for a proper discussion about it. He was worried that we couldn’t keep our party together until the next election without offering one; and he specifically raised the concern that we might end up as the only major party at the election not offering a referendum.
Ultimately, his fears over the business community’s reaction and the timing, and about not being able to negotiate a good deal, led him to caution against the referendum pledge. But he said he would support my decision, and like me, he believed that ultimately a referendum was probably inevitable anyway.
Michael Gove, one of the more ardent Eurosceptics in my team, was surprisingly opposed to promising a referendum, principally on the grounds that other priorities were more important.
Boris Johnson, who was Eurosceptic but had never argued for leaving the EU, was now echoing the call for a referendum. He seemed to have done almost no thinking about what sort of referendum, when it should be held, or what the government’s view should be. Nevertheless, as a popular figure, out of Parliament but in power as mayor of London, his support for a referendum – however inchoate – was a potentially dangerous development if we decided against holding one. And his apparent support, however muddled, for an immediate vote was an irritation.
I invited him and his family to Chequers for lunch later in 2012, and the subject was discussed over the table. ‘Let’s hold an in/out referendum now,’ he said. I explained my developing thinking – a referendum was now becoming close to inevitable, and we should make it part of a strategy for reforming Britain’s place in the EU. Boris’s wife Marina rather effectively shouted him down, saying, ‘Dave’s thought it through. I’m not sure you have. Why don’t you let the prime minister just get on with it?’ – or words to that effect.
In June 2012 there was a European Council that in my mind further vindicated the strategy. It was additional proof that the EU was changing, and that I should – and could – negotiate to protect Britain’s interests.
The change that was being made on this occasion was to create a banking union, and there was pressure on Britain to join in. Effectively, if another country’s banks went down, we would have to support them financially: we would have to stand behind Greek or Portuguese banks, and allow our banks to be regulated by the ECB, not the Bank of England. This was completely unacceptable. Thankfully, George and I managed to make sure that it would be agreed by the Eurozone seventeen rather than the EU twenty-seven, and led by the ECB, as part of the single market. But again we had come close to more power passing to Brussels without the British people having a say.
At my press conference afterwards I said that Europe was changing rapidly, that this would bring opportunities for us, and that we needed to think how to make the most of that – with the backing of our people. However, the newspapers missed this hint completely, and the stories the next morning said, ‘David Cameron has ruled out any referendum that could see Britain leave the EU’. So the following day, on the helicopter flight to Plymouth for Armed Forces Day, I typed out an article for the Telegraph on my iPad, setting the record straight.
In it I gave a further hint of a renegotiation and a referendum: ‘The fact is the British people are not happy with what they have, and neither am I. That’s why I said on Friday that the problem with an in/out referendum is that it offers a single choice, whereas what I want – and what I believe the vast majority of the British people want – is to make changes to our relationship.’ I then pointed to the sorts of things I would be seeking: ‘Far from there being too little Europe, there is too much of it. Too much cost; too much bureaucracy; too much meddling in issues that belong to nation states or civic society or individuals. Whole swathes of legislation covering social issues, working time and home affairs should, in my view, be scrapped.’ I made it clear that I would clarify my position on Europe in due course, and that ‘For me the two words “Europe” and “referendum” can go together … but let us give the people a real choice first.’
I wanted to get all the autumn European Councils out of the way before I gave the promised speech. That took us to the end of 2012, which meant the speech would actually have to take place in 2013. But even then we struggled to pin down a date. We settled on 18 January in Amsterdam. Ed drafted my speech, with the help of John Casson, the long-serving and energetic speechwriter Tim Kiddell, and Helen Bower, my impressive foreign affairs press chief, who I would later make the prime minister’s official spokesman. Clare Foges wrote the opening few pages: a beautifully crafted homage
to British–European history.
But then, two days before I was due to deliver the speech, I was told that al-Qaeda-linked terrorists had seized a gas facility at In Amenas in Algeria. Several British citizens were among the 132 foreign nationals held hostage there, eight hundred miles from the capital Algiers and one of the most remote places on earth.
COBR sprang into action, coordinating with BP and the Norwegians and Japanese, who also had nationals working out there. The situation was desperate: we were threatened with the biggest loss of life of British people in a terrorist incident overseas since 9/11. After a frantic few days the Algerians finally recaptured the compound. Forty hostages had lost their lives, including six British citizens and one Colombian who lived in Britain.
The tragic episode meant that the speech had to be postponed – and the only suitable day was the already packed Wednesday on which I had PMQs and would then be flying to Davos.
As the fact of the referendum had already been trailed, the news on the day would be its timing. It would take place by the middle of the next Parliament – in other words before the end of 2017. William and the Foreign Office were worried that we were boxing ourselves in. But I felt that if I started pushing it too far back, I would lose credibility. We knew from voter research that people welcomed the prospect of a referendum but were, naturally enough, suspicious that we would promise one and not hold it. A date was essential.
For the Record Page 52