The EU turn Cameron must make

Written by Chris Huhne MP and published in The Times on Fri 30th Jun 2006

Remaining in the European People's Party is the only way the Tories will have any clout

THE DEBATE about whether Conservative members of the European Parliament should withdraw from the European People's Party, the main centre-right grouping, has been conducted almost entirely in partisan terms as if nothing else mattered. In fact, such a withdrawal is likely to undermine Britain's wider interests by weakening the liberalising coalition at Strasbourg.

Hard as it is for many people to imagine, MEPs do wield real power over Commission proposals. For example, it was the European Parliament that insisted that any powers delegated to the Commission on financial services should be for four years, after which a "sunset clause" requires a new vote. That keeps the Commission on a short leash.

Without such amendments pushed through by market-oriented MEPs, some daft Commission proposals would have wrought far more damage. The eurobond market could easily have deserted the EU in general -and London in particular -if the checking of information requirements on share and bond issuers had been more onerous.

These are merely areas of which I have direct experience as a former MEP, but they could be replicated for industry after industry -telecoms, chemicals, cars, aviation and so on. Britain is a big country with a great deal at stake in the standard-setting that is essential to the working of the EU's single market. If David Cameron were to withdraw the British Conservatives from the largest group in the European Parliament, he would certainly weaken Britain's ability to fight for its interests.

In order to amend Commission proposals for EU law, the European Parliament needs to muster the votes of half of its 732 members. That is one reason why only three groups truly matter in the parliament: the European People's Party, Liberals and Socialists.

These three are the only groups that regularly negotiate together, because they can deliver the necessary supermajority. Other groups such as the Greens and the various fractious nationalist and xenophobic groups with which the Tories propose to ally themselves are regarded as too small and ill-disciplined to be worth much.

Quite simply, they are not in the loop. When I was the Liberal group's economic spokesman, I seldom bothered to negotiate with them.

The liberalising supermajority that saved the City of London from an even worse fate than the present EU financial services legislation was composed of most of the EPP (except the southern Europeans), some of the Socialists (mainly the Scandinavians and British) and all the Liberal group. Building this coalition would have been inestimably more difficult -if not impossible -without the Conservatives' influence within the EPP. The Conservatives would find it particularly hard to deliver the votes of the largest centre-right contingent from Germany if they were not in the EPP.

By contrast, it does not matter a jot whether British Tory MEPs agree or disagree with their centre-right colleagues about federalism, for a very simple reason.

MEPs have no sway whatsoever over the present or future powers of the EU, as these are entirely determined by treaty negotiation between national governments. So the withdrawal of Tory MEPs would dramatically reduce their effectiveness where they have real power -over single market legislation that matters for our prosperity - while making no difference to the federalist issue to which the Tories ostensibly object.

For those of us who have studied the modus operandi of the Tory Euro-phobes over the years, this poor trade-off should come as no surprise. Like most extremists, they are far more interested in passionate posturing than pragmatic politics.

Solid parliamentary work of legislative amendments in committee bores these people, while an anti-European crusade conducted in the pages of right-wing newspapers is much more fun.

And so what if withdrawal from the EPP hurts British interests in the short run? That will make it even more likely that their real goal -complete withdrawal from the EU -comes a little bit closer. These are Tory Trotskyites who are quite happy that things should get worse, because they barmily think they will then get better.

But this surely makes it all the more extraordinary that Mr Cameron should give such notions any houseroom. True, he attracted the support of this group of hardline Europhobes during his leadership contest precisely because he promised to withdraw the Tories from the EPP, but he was surely unaware of the full consequences. Equally, he was probably unaware that the Tory MEPs promised their voters in 2004 that they would stay in the EPP.

Someone is going to have to break their word: either Mr Cameron or his MEPs. In the circumstances, the safest course of action is to assess coolly and calmly what is in Britain's national interests. If Mr Cameron does so, it will be quite impossible to conclude anything other than that the Tory MEPs should stay to fight their -and our -corner in the EPP.

This is the first real test of whether Mr Cameron is truly a centrist interested in the realities of power, institutions and interests, or an ideologue more enamoured of totems. If Mr Cameron wants to send out a message that the Tory party has changed, he should perform an abrupt U-turn. After all, the most nutritious part of a politician's diet is often his own words. Mr Cameron needs to get eating.