Placing party interest above national interest

Last week’s European summit was economically inadequate and politically disastrous for Britain.

There was no plan for growth agreed, no credible plan for reducing deficits agreed, no plan for recapitalising the banks agreed, and no plan agreed for the European Central Bank to act as the lender of last resort.  The risk of further economic crisis remains but, inexcusably, the British government did little to address it.

There is a common view across Europe, as well as within the UK, that what happened was undeniably bad for business and bad for Britain. Business leaders recognise that you can’t negotiate in an empty room – Sir Martin Sorrell said this week “I’d prefer to be inside the tent not outside.” A YouGov survey at the start of the week found just 24% think the outcome of the summit is good for Britain and only 15% think the outcome is good for the economy while more than twice as many, 34% fear it will be bad. And let’s not forget the words of David Cameron’s own Deputy, Nick Clegg, on the summit outcome: “I don’t think that’s good for jobs in the, in the City or elsewhere, I don’t think it’s good for growth or for families up and down the country.”

David Cameron delivered none of the safeguards he promised and the risk is that other countries could now rewrite the rules of the European economy without the UK even being in the room. To veto something means to stop it from happening. In truth David Cameron stopped nothing from happening – that’s not exercising a veto it’s just losing the argument.

Isolation can sometimes be a price worth paying for getting your own way but isolation achieving only defeat is unforgiveable.

Ahead of this summit there was hardly any evidence of either the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary visiting European capitals to build support for Britain’s position. Indeed, the government’s demands were tabled only a few hours before, after David Cameron’s mauling at the hands of his backbenchers at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.

To win the leadership of his party, Cameron promised to pull out of the centre-right grouping the European People’s Party, as he did, and so he was left unable to attend the pre-summit meeting of the leaders of France, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Finland, Bulgaria, Malta and Poland. When we entered the final hours of the summit in so shambolic a fashion, is it any wonder that Cameron was left unable to secure a single objective Britain had set or secure a single ally?

And let’s be in no doubt the roots of the night of Thursday 8 December lie deep in David Cameron’s failure to modernise the Tory party – he has placed party interest above the national interest.

But the end of the summit is just the beginning of the process. Nothing has yet been signed and the deal is unlikely to be agreed until March. That makes David Cameron’s decision just to walk away from the table even more self defeating.

In the words of Lord Kerr the former British Ambassador to the EU: “We chose to pick up the ball and the leave the pitch before the game started”.

Having flounced out of the room last week David Cameron now needs to put the national interest ahead of his party self interest and start to negotiate his way back to having a voice at the table. In this he would be following the example of his hero Margaret Thatcher, who was outvoted at the Milan summit in 1985 on the question of whether there should be a new treaty to bring in the single market. But, despite losing on the principle, she insisted on keeping Britain’s seat at the negotiating table. The end result was the Single European Act, which was highly beneficial to growth and jobs in Britain.

If Cameron thinks the summit was an end to Europe’s economic problems, he is dangerously naive.

The collapse of the eurozone would have catastrophic consequences for Britain, so he must not simply walk away from the conversation.

Douglas Alexander is the shadow foreign secretary.