Douglas Carswell's Blog

Britain's new EU ambassador means business (as usual)

No one concerned about the continued transfer of power to Brussels can take comfort from news that senior Treasury official, Jon Cunliffe, is to become our next ambassador to Brussels.  

As head of UKREP, the team of British EU negotiators, Cunliffe will have enormous influence over the direction of our EU policy – certainly more than those you voted for in any election, or various ministerial monkeys who turn up to read out the communiqués and sign the deal placed in front of them.

Predictably, the spin behind Cunliffe’s appointment is that he is “tough as teak”, a man who likes saying “no” to foreigners.  Those who brief the press attach great importance to the fact he’s not from the overtly federalist Foreign Office.

Yet the idea Cunliffe’s appointment means a change of approach is balls.  If anything, it confirms that it’ll be EU business as usual.

It was Cunliffe who negotiated the Stabilisation Mechanism deal leading to the ECOFIN meeting in May, whereby Britain accepted enormous liabilities to try to prop up the Euro.  He thereby managed to make us part of the Euro debt union, if not the currency union.  

It was Cunliffe who negotiated British entry into a system of pan-European economic governance, which means our elected government and Parliament must subject our tax and spend decisions to EU oversight.

So concerned was I by the deal he negotiated, I met Cunliffe recently to discuss the small print of the Van Rompuy report, signed up to by George Osborne.  When I pressed Cunliffe on why non-Euro Britain was now subject to EU oversight (the ministers I raised it with didn’t seem to know), his response seemed to be along the lines of if I thought that bad, wait until I saw what else the Commission in Brussels had planned for us.  With someone like him leading the deal-making, I’m hardly surprised it’s one roll-over after another.

Perhaps most depressing of all is the fact that Downing Street is spinning about Cunliffe’s appointment at all.  I have been putting in Freedom of Information requests about this key British appointment, and tabled Parliamentary questions to try to ensure some measure of democratic oversight.  At every stage, I have met with evasion.

Now, perhaps knowing they’ll have to start giving answers, the government response is to leak the news in such a way as to create the impression of robustness.   It will be no substitute for having a coherent Europe policy in the national interest.

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