David Cameron didn’t “veto an EU treaty” but the Tories continue to say he did

The Tories persist in claiming, absolutely falsely, that in December 2011 David Cameron courageously and patriotically “vetoed an EU Treaty” to protect British interests, and was the first UK prime minister ever to have done so.  I have just received a lengthy questionnaire from the London region Conservative MPs which includes the following ‘question’:

In December 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron vetoed a new EU Treaty which European [sic] governments wanted to pass [sic] to deal with the Euro crisis because it didn’t protect British interests. How strongly do you agree or disagree with the Prime Minister taking this action?

In fact Mr Cameron never vetoed an EU Treaty: there was no treaty for him to veto.  On December 9th 2011 Mr Cameron returned from a summit meeting in Brussels boasting that he had bravely defended British interests by vetoing an EU treaty, on the grounds that the rest of the EU had refused to satisfy the conditions he had laid down for refraining from exercising his veto. These conditions amounted to a series of demands, mostly unconnected with the subject matter of the proposed treaty, with which Mr Cameron had confronted his EU colleagues for the first time in the early hours of the morning.  Not surprisingly, they rejected them out of hand.  Mr Cameron accordingly cast his lone vote against the proposal to embark on the negotiation of a treaty on the Eurozone.

All he had achieved with his ‘veto’ was to try to prevent the rest of the EU from using the Commission and other EU organs and facilities for the negotiation of a new treaty designed to impose more discipline on the Eurozone.  Some such treaty was self-evidently needed, so all 26 of the other EU heads of government agreed to go ahead and negotiate an agreement outside the EU framework, and to take legal advice on Mr Cameron’s assertion that his ‘veto’ prevented them from employing EU facilities for the negotiations.  A little later, the UK discreetly dropped its objections to this anyway.

So in the event, the only effect of the UK’s shabby attempt at blackmail was to ensure that Britain alone of the then 27 members of the EU was virtually excluded from having any input into the negotiations leading up to the new treaty. In trying to extract concessions for British interests, the prime minister only succeeded in excluding himself from a negotiation in which he would otherwise have been able to defend British interests.  (The embarrassing tale is related in more detail here).  If this episode is an accurate indicator of Mr Cameron’s negotiating skills, and of the truthfulness of the account of his actions that he then offered the British people, Labour should have no difficulty in exposing the fraud, recklessness and ineptitude of the current Tory strategy for Europe, and the reactionary character of its real aims.

It’s a shame that the Tories repeatedly get away with this (presumably conscious) misrepresentation of the facts.  The true story is just a little too technical, tangled and tedious to be easily and briefly deployed in rebuttal;  and most people have understandably forgotten about it.  So Mr Cameron is able to pose as the first British Prime Minister to have had the machismo to stand up to all those scheming “Europeans” and to veto their treaty in defence of our national interests.  Yuk.