Union plays down UK’s veto threat

Date: 23/05/1996

LEADING EU politicians have rounded on the UK for trying to 'blackmail' its EU partners into lifting the ban on British beef - but if that is Prime Minister John Major's goal, he will have to wait a long time before it stands any chance of working.

With the number of opportunities available to the UK to use its veto over the coming two months severely limited - and no sign yet that it intends to disrupt negotiations on longer-term issues - the end result may merely be to further sour already strained relations between the UK and the rest of the Union.

At the moment, most are attempting to play down the significance of the British action, avoiding talk of political crises and paralysis and expressing the hope that the UK will back away from its threats.

But if Major pursues his wrecking strategy all the way to next month's Florence summit - and seeks to disrupt debates on key issues ranging from the Intergovernmental Conference to unemployment - other EU leaders could lose patience.

The signs are already there, with Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini warning that the UK's problems could “not be resolved by strong-arm tactics or blackmail” and German Deputy Foreign Minister Werner Hoyer saying he hoped “the rationality for which the British are known would gradually prevail”.

As routine meetings of Union officials went ahead normally yesterday (22 May), UK diplomats said their representatives had been instructed to continue playing a full part in talks.

“This is not an empty chair policy,” said one. “British officials will not sit quietly behind their name plates. They will contribute to the discussions, but will make it clear that there is no guarantee of the UK agreeing to the issue.” He added: “The instructions have been sent out and are quite clear. Where unanimity is required, it won't be achieved.”

British warnings that it might disrupt proceedings at the IGC negotiations are also being seen as an empty threat. With concrete decisions on matters of substance still some months away, there is nothing for the UK to block at the moment and IGC negotiators said British representative Stephen Wall “fully participated in the lively debate” yesterday.

There are, however, likely to be some casualties of the new British strategy, although most of the handful of issues where the UK will have the chance to exercise its veto are in areas where it might have been expected to block progress anyway.

In the case of Europol, hopes that the UK might at last be preparing to give ground on the contentious issue of whether the European Court of Justice should be given jurisdiction over its activities were dashed yesterday when a British official said efforts to find a solution were no longer “going on”.

But there was no guarantee that a solution could have been found with or without the UK's new policy of non-cooperation. Hoyer indicated yesterday that the rest of the Union would reluctantly conclude a separate agreement, excluding the UK, if it continued to block progress until the Florence summit - set as the deadline for an accord.

A second significant casualty of the British approach could be the proposed revisions to the Television Without Frontiers Directive, which the UK supports but may now veto when culture ministers meet on 11 June to discuss changes demanded by the European Parliament.

The UK is expected to wield its veto for the first time since the announcement at a meeting of civil protection ministers today (23 May), but it had been thought likely to block the items up for discussion - which include an EU-wide action programme for civil protection - anyway on subsidiarity grounds. Another casualty will be an insolvency directive which had been due for ratification this week.

The UK could face a difficult dilemma over one issue facing the Union's finance ministers. At a meeting on 3 June, they are due to agree - by unanimity - a regulation that would allow on-the-spot checks to help combat fraud, an issue long at the top of the British EU agenda.

The UK will get another chance to employ its veto at a meeting of environment ministers scheduled for 25-26 June, when unanimity would be required to agree conclusions on ways of limiting CO2 from car emissions.

Otherwise, all the issues before the Council of Ministers between now and the end of July are either subjects to be decided by qualified majority vote or ones which are not ripe for a decision in any case.

It was unclear last night what impact British threats to disrupt the summit might have, beyond weakening the political impetus behind any declarations made by other EU leaders. The UK is already resisting attempts to force it into an ERM II designed to stabilise ties between countries inside and outside the single currency bloc, and has declared its opposition to Commission President Jacques Santer's call for the redeployment of 2 billion ecu of unspent EU funds into job-creation projects.