December came, and with it an Autumn Statement that was full of the fruits of our fiscal prudence. We had stabilised our finances enough to guarantee real-terms protection for the police – an increase of £900 million by the end of the decade – and to give the NHS half a trillion extra over five years. The basic state pension would rise to £119.30 a week. Following the shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s response – reading extracts from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book – the two alternatives of British politics were laid out clearly.
I was in a good position at the end of 2015. Our lead on the economy was at record levels. My personal ratings were high. The migration crisis had shown that I could lead in Europe, and that our special place in the EU immunised us from its worst effects.
But at the same time I was worried. Could I really get things done in Europe – a renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership – while it was so focused on the migration crisis? And could I really persuade the people of Britain that we were protected from illegal immigration when the issue had become so prominent, and when the scare stories about its implications had only just begun?
45
Renegotiation
My biggest task after the election would be the biggest of my life. It came in two parts: a renegotiation and a referendum. Both were necessary, and both were long overdue.
I didn’t see them as separate endeavours; they were two sides of the same coin. I could never have undertaken a proper renegotiation without a referendum. I needed that endpoint to focus the minds of the leaders from whom I was seeking change.
I would never have countenanced a referendum without a renegotiation. A choice between ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’, if all that was available was the status quo, was a false choice: we should attempt real reform. There were genuine problems that needed addressing – those we were facing now, those I saw coming down the track. As I repeatedly told European leaders, it was ‘my strategy to keep Britain in Europe’.
Putting it off, ignoring the grievances, letting the EU move in a direction we didn’t want while dragging us along with it, would have made leaving – what was by now being referred to as ‘Brexit’ – not just probable, but inevitable. As I’ve said, I was convinced a referendum would happen in the near future anyway, and most likely under a more Eurosceptic Tory government which might not even offer the option of reform. It could simply be ‘status quo or go’ – and it would push for the latter.
Those who say that I just needed some deal, any deal, to enable me to put the question of membership to the electorate are totally wrong. I knew just how important getting the right reform would be to getting the right result. The polling was clear: there was only a majority for remaining in Europe if longstanding problems were addressed. Indeed, I was acutely aware of the danger of not getting enough from an intransigent EU to satisfy an impatient public. ‘I do worry that what is negotiable is not sellable and what is sellable is not negotiable,’ I confessed at the time on tape.
What gave me hope, however, was that I had won concessions in the past. I had cut the EU budget. I had vetoed a treaty. I had got us out of bailouts. I had triggered the ‘opt-out’ on justice and home affairs that clawed back powers which had been passed from Westminster to Brussels. We had asked for extrawurst, and we had got extrawurst.
My relations with other EU leaders were strong. The renegotiation and referendum had been signalled long in advance. And I had won an election on the basis of carrying them out.
Added to that, the EU itself was at a significant juncture. Its single currency had just survived a near-death experience. Its central vision of tearing down borders had (almost literally) hit a brick wall. Populist parties challenging its existence were on the march. Now, an important member – the second-largest economy, the biggest financial services centre, the co-founder of the single market – was hovering at the exit. Surely the EU would realise that it had to adapt if it was to remain intact.
When asked what I would do if I couldn’t get a serious renegotiation under way, I said repeatedly that I ‘ruled nothing out’. I meant it. If our partners in the EU and the European Commission had refused to engage at all, even someone as committed to our membership as me would have had to consider walking away, and to recommend leaving. But if I could initiate proper negotiations and address the problems I was most concerned about, then the heart of my ‘renegotiation and referendum’ strategy was to throw myself into campaigning to remain.
Writing all this now, I completely accept that my strategy failed to achieve the outcome I desired. But at the time – and subsequently – I believed that the risks of doing nothing were greater. As I have said many times, that doesn’t mean I have no regrets, or do not believe that things could have been done differently or better in terms of the negotiation, or the campaign, or indeed the timing. But it is why I don’t regret the central decision to adopt a strategy of a renegotiation and referendum.
My focus wasn’t just the all-important new settlement. The process of holding this historic vote mattered too.
And on the first Monday back at my desk after the general election, I needed to get on and start deciding some of these things. There were more questions than the central matter of when the referendum would be held. Determining the franchise, setting the question, laying down the rules that would determine everything from spending limits to purdah periods – all these things could have an impact.
On all the process questions I faced, I was torn between two considerations.
On the one hand, as this was such an important question, with such huge consequences, there were strong arguments for taking special measures, such as expanding the franchise, setting a threshold and allowing the government to campaign all the way to the end.
On the other hand, special measures such as these would look like – and to a large extent would be – an establishment stitch-up, tipping the balance in favour of remaining.
Heeding the second argument had served me well in the Scottish referendum, and was uppermost in my mind. But looking back, I think I gave it too much weight.
The first question we faced was over a proposal to extend the franchise to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, as had happened in Scotland. This could have helped the Remain case. The Lords tabled an amendment for it on the EU Referendum Bill. George was in favour.
But I resisted. I had never supported lowering the voting age before. There has to be a cut-off, and the age at which you can get married without your parents’ consent, drink alcohol and work full-time seems like a sensible age to start voting. And I believe that what applies to general elections should apply to referendums too.
I also thought that changing our stance would look completely opportunistic. Plus, Conservative MPs were something like 9–1 against. Any amendment would therefore have had to be carried not just with the help of Labour votes, but with the overwhelming support of opposition MPs. This was not the way to get sceptical MPs on board for supporting my overall approach.
Then there was the quandary over how to phrase the question. I wanted it to be ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union – Yes/No?’ with ‘Yes’ being ‘stay in the EU on the basis of the new deal’. This mirrored the 1975 formulation, and was what our draft Bill originally proposed. But the law said that the Electoral Commission had to comment, and there was strong pressure to defer to its view.
The Commission recommended that the question be ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ There was little alternative, I felt, but to comply. Had I insisted, and then been criticised by the Commission for not listening to its advice, we would have suffered as a result.
The loss of the positive word ‘Yes’ from the ballot paper was bad news. And ‘Leave’ sounded dynamic in contrast to ‘Remain’.
We also had to determine whether all UK citizens living overseas sho
uld get a vote (currently that right expired fifteen years after moving abroad), and whether EU citizens in the UK should (they could only vote in local elections). Again, both would probably have helped Remain.
The arguments were far from straightforward. Labour – including many who would later criticise me for not doing everything I could to win – would, I believed, have opposed any attempt to extend the franchise to more people living overseas. They feared its implications for other elections, and could have held it up in the Lords. So, again, I decided not to pursue it (and besides, while enfranchising those living in Europe might have got more Remain votes, enfranchising those in Australia, Canada and the USA might have brought more Leave votes).
The biggest call was the question of whether we could have imposed a threshold for any decision to leave the EU. In other words, saying that such a decision needed not just 50 per cent of those who voted, but a certain percentage of the electorate as a whole (some suggested 40 per cent). This mechanism was used in the devolution referendums at the end of the 1970s (Scotland voted 52 per cent to 48 per cent for devolution, but failed to pass the threshold, and the issue was left to fester for another two decades).
An even tougher alternative would have been to say that Leave had to win a majority in each of the four nations of the UK. I thought this suggestion was dangerous: requiring separate majorities would encourage separatism. We were one United Kingdom, and should either stay together or leave together.
I was more tempted by the threshold argument. Having devoured books on British political history, I knew that thresholds were brought about in the 1970s through backbench pressure. I thought there was a good chance this would happen again. Then it would be Parliament deciding, not me trying to fix the result.
Ultimately, the question of a threshold was discussed in the Lords, but it didn’t go any further. There was no serious effort in the Commons, and there are many people who raise the issue now who did not at the time. The reason I didn’t make a move on it is that requiring a threshold for one side would have been the ultimate way of strengthening the argument that the establishment was trying to stitch up the result in advance. And what good would it have served if Leave had won a majority, but then been judged to have lost? In exactly the same way as it is delusional to believe we could have gone on forever without a vote on membership, it is delusional to believe that we could have prevented a further referendum by putting our hand on the scale in this one.
Instead I saved my firepower for trying to make sure that the government could operate effectively as close to referendum day as possible. This not only made campaigning sense; it was also because government business with the EU would have to continue during the referendum – and because Remain was the position of the government. Therefore in the draft Bill we did not include a period of purdah. This gave Labour, the SNP (both of which have conveniently forgotten that they did this) and Conservative rebels something to fight, and they pushed through a vote on purdah restrictions. It meant that in those crucial six weeks before the referendum, my brigade of Whitehall staff would be reduced to a platoon of political advisers.
Next to the threshold question, the process decision with the biggest impact would be timing. The latest we could hold the referendum was December 2017. This was written into law. But I always had my eye on 2016. French and German elections would take place in 2017, and it would be far harder to get special concessions for Britain when the two other biggest countries in the EU (and the two other big net contributors) were facing their electorates.
Also, our economy was strong now – but who could be certain about two years hence? The migration crisis had subsided, but what if the summer of makeshift boats on the Mediterranean were to repeat itself? Yes, going relatively quickly would give me less time to negotiate. But I saw greater risks on the horizon. What’s more, I didn’t think that protracted negotiations with the EU would produce a better outcome – and they might even cause the public to question the wisdom of being a member of such an organisation.
Therefore, at the first major meeting about our EU plans, less than a week after the election, I asked officials to work up ‘the most ambitious possible timetable’ for the renegotiation and referendum.
I saw Lynton Crosby for dinner on 21 July (we met informally every month), and he agreed that next year was as good a time as any. George was in favour of going early. I finalised the early option over curry with George, though we agreed it could be pushed back if we didn’t get a good deal.
I would start the negotiation process at the June 2015 European Council, aiming to agree a deal by the December Council (though it could slide to the next one, in February 2016). The referendum could then take place on the earliest date officials had earmarked: 23 June 2016.
Of course the renegotiation wouldn’t be based on the wider-scale treaty change that many had forecast. I had, I admit, thought this wider change likely to happen, because it was so obviously necessary. But I underestimated the desire of the EU’s leaders to avoid changes they would have to consult their own voters about. The entire request for change was now something the UK was bringing about unilaterally. As George put it, I planned to start a fight in a room all by myself.
The absence of a general treaty renegotiation and Europe-wide reform wasn’t necessarily a disaster. Indeed, it might even have made life easier in some respects. During previous treaty negotiations UK governments had used up enormous amounts of energy batting away proposals for even more integration and political union. The same thing would have happened again. So we were able to get to the point more quickly. And anyway, Europe-wide reform had never been particularly sellable to the British people. I don’t think they ever believed that the EU was moving our way – nor do I think they particularly wanted it to move our way. They were never going to embrace it like continental Europeans did. What they wanted to know was simply that we could live in our own version of Europe with an annual bill we could stomach, immigration levels we could handle, and rules and regulations we could see the sense in.
So a big part of the ambition was, as I recorded at the time, ‘to try and correct the things that British people don’t like about Europe’ – in particular, the moves towards political union, the excessive regulations and the lack of control over immigration.
But it was also about correcting the things people didn’t necessarily dislike, but which were damaging our interests. That, to me, was essential. If you only focus on the things that rankle with voters, you’re little better than a populist. Leadership is answering both those qualms and the big issues you see coming down the track.
People weren’t sitting in pubs bemoaning the dangers of the Eurozone’s discrimination against the pound. ‘They have their currency, we have ours. That’s not going to change, so what’s the problem?’ was the common attitude. The problem was that the Eurozone was starting to caucus and make rules about the single market and financial services that profoundly affected the UK. We needed safeguards to stop this from happening.
At heart, the ambition of my plan was simple: to shift the EU from its long-held view that all its members were travelling towards the same destination, but at different speeds, and that Britain, the reluctant European, would get there in the end. I wanted to get it across, once and for all, that the UK was not only travelling at a different speed, but that we had a different destination in mind altogether. ‘Yes’ to the trade and cooperation, but ‘no’ – indeed ‘never’ – to political union, currency union, military union or immigration union.
I will forever be criticised by Eurosceptics for not seeking more profound changes. I stubbornly maintain that the sort of changes they wanted were completely undeliverable. More to the point, I continue to believe that different speeds and different destinations was profound.
However, the fact that there wasn’t a more general renegotiation of the treaties under way did create one other big practical problem for me
. In the absence of treaty change, how would we get guarantees that the changes we sought would be legally binding?
It was imperfect, but there was a solution. Officials proudly paraded what they called the ‘Danish Model’. It would be agreed that the next time the treaties were opened up, our reforms would be adopted formally. In the meantime they would be fully implemented, and backed by legally binding instruments lodged as a new treaty at the United Nations. That was what happened in Denmark after it rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum in 1992.
I looked at it this way. The federalists had spent years inserting language into one treaty to make the next integrationist treaty inevitable. We were trying to do the same, but for opposite political ends. And also to set a precedent – that reform could be achieved, and further reform pursued.
A less easy problem to solve – indeed, one of the biggest problems when negotiating with the EU – is that once your proposals are distributed to twenty-seven other member states, they are almost certain to be leaked and published. So, when you know you are likely to get less than you initially ask for in a negotiation, how do you avoid the humiliation of that happening in plain sight?
I decided to divide the new terms I was negotiating into four distinct ‘baskets’. Within each basket was a bundle of different proposals, some of which I might get more on, some I might get less on. I would try to avoid ever setting out in one place everything that was in each basket. But ultimately I had to get something meaningful within each. MPs and the press would endlessly complain, ‘You haven’t set out everything you’re aiming for.’ But to do so would, I am convinced, have been counter-productive. What’s more, the basket idea was – though more broadly this is something I failed on – crucial to expectation-management at home.
For the Record Page 79