Douglas Carswell's Blog

Two EU statements compared

This afternoon, I listened to David Cameron’s Commons statement following the latest EU summit, and thought I might compare the text with what he said after his first EU summit in June.

21^st June: “On budget surveillance let me be clear – the UK Budget will be shown to this House first – and not the Commission”. 

Today the emphasis seemed to be that: “All Member States – including the UK – have participated in surveillance for more than a decade.”   

In June, “We will back measures that help sort out the Eurozone. We will not back measures that pass power from the UK to Brussels”. 

Today the small print shows that the European Council Task Force, in which George Osborne was “fully involved”, goes so far as to “recommend deeper macro-economic surveillance with the introduction of a new mechanism underpinned by a new legal framework .... applying to all EU Member States”. 

Surely that means that the EU gets to pass legislation that will affect Member States budgets, including the UK's?  No? Perhaps it only means that in the event of a dispute about it, the European Court adjudicates?

I’m genuinely curious to know why the emphasis seems to have changed in the past few months. Exposure to senior civil servants and Kim Darroch’s team at UKREP, perhaps?

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