The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, has launched a rare attack on Gordon Brown, warning that the British Prime Minister is putting the international fight against terrorism at risk.
Ahead of the crucial Lisbon summit on the European Union reform treaty this week, Barroso said that Britain’s insistence on ”opt-outs” from clauses to create greater cooperation on law and order is setting back the fight against European terror networks.
In an unusual rebuke of an European Union member state, Barroso said Britain’s stance amounted to double standards. ”I am not happy,” he told the Observer, days before Brown travels to Lisbon to secure tough new ”red lines”, designed to guarantee that the UK will not be forced to take part in new EU law and order regulations.
”If you ask my opinion, I think it is a mistake … Sometimes it appears as a contradiction. Britain, which is always first to ask for global action against terrorism, appears not to be as committed as other members of the EU to a common effort as other members of the EU. This surprises me.”
Barroso’s intervention underlines the deep anger in Brussels at the hard-line stance being adopted by Britain in the treaty negotiations. Brown has secured more concessions from Portugal, which is chairing the negotiations as part of its presidency of the EU, since the broad outlines of the treaty were agreed at Blair’s last summit in June.
European leaders will meet in Lisbon on Thursday and Friday this week to try to reach agreement on the EU reform treaty, which replaces the constitutional treaty rejected by French and Dutch voters in referenda in 2005.
The Germans and Portuguese, who have been in charge of the negotiations this year, have amended the text to please France and Britain, the main complainants. Thatcherite language on the free market, which unsettled French voters, has been removed. Britain has been given a series of concessions on law and order that have angered Barroso in three ways:
Britain has gone along with the broad thrust of the treaty by accepting the loss of its national veto over laws to improve police and judicial cooperation, which will now be decided on what is known as a ”qualified majority voting” basis. But Britain has demanded a right to decide whether to ”opt in” on these areas. It will also benefit from an ”emergency brake” that would effectively allow Britain to ”opt out” at a later stage.
This country has demanded that the European Court of Justice, which polices the implementation of EU laws, should not be allowed to rule on these new areas for five years. This concession was granted in recent weeks.
Britain is demanding that key EU initiatives decided under the old rules, such as the European arrest warrant, will have to be completely renegotiated if there is an attempt to amend them under the new system. One suspect in the July 21 2005 London bombings was arrested in Italy under this system.
Barroso said he reluctantly accepted the dispensations for Britain as the price for securing a deal on the treaty. But he added: ”I think it is better to have opt-outs for one or two countries than not to have any progress at all for the EU. I would prefer not to have them, of course: to fight international terrorism and international crime, we will need more, not less, coordination and integration of policies in the fields of security.”
He even went as far as to say that police could now find their hands tied. ”It will take more time for the coordination of the effort, not only of the police but [also] the judicial authorities.” Britain is also doing itself no favours, he added. ”The best way to use influence in a common project is not just by saying no. It is giving solutions to common problems.”
Brown is unmoved by Barroso’s objections because he regards a toughening of Britain’s ”red lines” as the price he must pay to resist Tory demands for a referendum on the treaty. British officials have made clear in private that the treaty would be killed off in a British referendum.
Barroso, the most Anglophile European Commission president in a generation, who was appointed after strong lobbying by Tony Blair in 2004, hinted that the arrival of Brown may explain some of the difficulties. ”There was a change in prime minister, so quite naturally these internal issues have taken a prominent role.”
A fluent English speaker who makes regular private visits to London to visit his son who is studying in London, Barroso has embarked on something of a personal mission to persuade Britain of the merits of EU membership. It is almost exactly a year since he asked Britain’s political elite, in the annual Hugo Young Memorial Lecture, whether it wants to play a leading role in Europe or ”sulk from the periphery”.
Having delivered a similar message in a speech in Oxford last week, Barroso insisted that his message is slowly changing public opinion. But he indicated a sense of frustration as he pleaded with Britain to stop seeing the EU as a foreign plot.
”What I am saying to all the member states, and not just to Britain, is please don’t mention the EU as a kind of foreign power that has invaded us. It is simply not true. The EU is us.
”Britain is open to the world and it is impossible to be open to the world and closed to Europe. Europe is the indispensable [link] between the national and the global. A Britain that is committed to global issues … understands perfectly well why we need the EU dimension.” — Guardian Unlimited Â