Cameron uses UK veto - what will it mean for us and Europe (and the rest of the world)?

[Callisto]

Just that.

I'm glad that DC had the balls to use the veto - the treaty being discussed would not have been good for Britain and could have been bad. However, the Asian markets have already responded by falling and I'm guessing that that US and Euro markets will fall too. So, are there any economists (or otherwise) out there who can throw some light on what may happen next?

I have a relative whose high level career in ag science meant he was aware of major problems in British animal feeding practices compared to others, which led him to predict the eventual outcome years before.

A lot of the "the City's PURE EVIL" is coming from the government, and you have to wonder why they're so keen to allocate blame ...

Agreed. Stop blindly swallowing this 'it is all the banker's fault'. The bankers don't set the interest rate. The bankers don't make a trade surplus or a trade deficit.

The government does. If you want to blindly swallow pink, fluffy good intentions, know that it has to be paid for. New Labour bribed YOU (and I am talking to you, Scotland and North of England, and your children and grandchildren will pay for it. I cannot believe that this country was so stupid as to vote for those incompetent clowns not once, not twice, but three times.

That is not a party political observation, it is a statement of fact. Money doesn't grow on trees, EVERYTHING has to be paid for. By someone.

Math, er.... do you know what a JCB is? It is a MACHINE, with a DIGGER attached. Meaning................ geddit? JCB disease!

I absolutely agree with your relative. But if he thinks that rendering (what you are referring to) was only done in the UK, he is mistaken.

Rendering (giving animal protein to animals) happened across the industry. NOT only in the UK.

There's nothing really new in all these things we've been having these sorts of trade access issues with Europe for ages. The "real" point is that this won't turn into a serious cut off nose to spite issue.

• The French and Germans and other euro nations HAD to go with the treaty because closer integration is the only way out... what their own voters will think of Brussels having the ability to reject their budgets gos only knows.
• We didn't have to go with it, and have no damage to them by not going with it. Financial Services respresent 10+ of tax revenues and prob more than that in overall income. Other European nations don't have this to risk. In fact it would have been easy for the others to agree to this but they didn't BECAUSE they didn't want us to be part of the new treaty... we got what we wanted they got what they wanted.

-Looking forwards of course there is going to be some give and take because the offices of Europe ( the council, the parliamnet ect) cannot work on any business which is part of the 26 not the 27... the reason is we largely pay for the administration through our £18Bn annual contribution... this of course won't be sustainable and will have to lead to a negotiated split... Europe won't want to lose all our cash, we won't want to lose all our access... we'll end up I'm sure with a Swiss type situation but with perhaps some greater involvement and some payment to Europe. Remember we need access to europes markets and they need access to ours, European countries have a great deal more invested here than we have there.

• These fractures are always made to sound painful so that people can be seen to have won things... journalists also like the drama. In reallity I suspect it suited both the euro countries and ourselves to move towards a split.

We'll be fine. But we wouldn't have been if we'd thrown our hat in with them to this degree. The Euro is still in deep trouble and this won't solve it.

goodness, there's a lot of unrelated rubbish on this thread. BSE FFS? what the hell does that have to do with Cameron's actions? not the same point. british companies fed cows to cows... i'd start by looking closer to home. and UK MPs tried to cover it up.

personally, i think cameron's move is a mistake. stand to be proven wrong, but UK now very isolated. but if the euro goes down, the UK will still be in big trouble. where's the win?

not that most of the posters on this thread have much of an idea what's going on.

The point about BSE was that even when UK beef was deemed to be safe, our continental partners blocked imports of said meat into Europe.

I think Cameron has made a good move - if Sarkozy loses next year, Hollande has said he will reverse the intergovernmental treaty the EZ+ group are going with, as he doesn't want to give up French sovereignty.

The UK has always been isolated in Europe because we play by the rules, and the rest don't. If the euro goes down, then at least we'll be in the lifeboats rowing away, rather then rearranging the deckchairs (to extend the Titanic analogy of yesterday).

Even Delors has said the Euro was structurally unsound from the start. Some wily Belgians know this as well, as some of my receipts come with the price in Euros and Belgian francs. Won't take much to remove the euro bit!

If you think it's bad to have unelected Eurocrats decide the fate of the British banking and financial services sector (never mind the small detail of the European Parliament) wait until the financial services industry decides to put its position to the British government and see how you like it when there's really no democratic input into policy formation.

Mathanxiety do you mean that the Banks will rule the UK if we go it alone (because the rest of Europe will use Berlin)? Genuine question - it's all Greek to me!

Someone please start a BSE thread, this is getting really tedious. All I remember is that we used to be able to buy brains in the butchers, then about 5 years BEFORE the BSE outbreak, you couldn't buy it anywhere.

The brains were being fed to the animals, Pretendhousewife .

British banks operate in the context of international rather than national markets. Hence the dreaded prospect of banking contagion. As long as there are investments by British banks abroad there will be pressure on the government to support whatever currency or financial control buoys up the value of those investments. Iceland let its banks fail even though there was immense pressure from outside Iceland to make the Icelandic taxpayer foot the bill for its banking industry's mistakes (the taxpayers baulked). I do not see the British government following the path that Iceland took. Britain has no choice but to support its banks (which all have exposure in the Eurozone); the alternative to supporting the Euro is economic freefall for Britain as well as for the rest of Europe. Wiping the slate, pretending the Euro could be done away with tomorrow is not an option. It exists and banks are all interconnected to the tonsils. Banks are calling the tune here.

'The UK has always been isolated in Europe because we play by the rules, and the rest don't. If the euro goes down, then at least we'll be in the lifeboats rowing away, rather then rearranging the deckchairs (to extend the Titanic analogy of yesterday).'
Swimming with one foot on the bottom is what has isolated Britain, not alleged 'playing by the rules' with everyone else running amok. (Splendid) Isolation has always been Britain's thing. Nobody will shed a tear when Poland eventually takes Britain's place and Polish families start employing British nannies, gardeners, roofers, etc.

Europe will end up looking east to Russia rather than west for markets when Britain gets the heave ho. The developing markets of the former eastern bloc will also absorb a lot of western production if there is a rising tide to float all ships. And then there is India and China.

What. an. Embarrassment.

Cameron doesn't perform well when he is away from his little gang.

Nor when he is with them actually. Lol!

We'll be making the proper judgement on Cameron in a year or two. If the UK economy has performed well with companies coming here to gain the advantages of trade with Europe (EU) without additional taxation (EZ); whilst we see the Eurozone slowing and bitter complaints from some members about enforced changes to eg their tax rates and the flight of some companies; then this will be seen as a defining positive moment.

On the other hand, I could all go horribly wrong and our trade balance might suffer badly; whist EZ does manage to stay steady pay off enough of the massive debts to avoid disaster.

Given that even MT signed up to everything in the end, I think it will have been a great shock to leaders of EZ countries and senior EU bureaucrats that a firm "no" was actually used. They have spun the post match commentary really, really well; their shock and dismay has been totally covered up.

But "losing" a major contributor outs big holes in their figures; and the fiscal union of Europe will remain unattainable through the EU - which has to continue to exist at 27.

Interesting discussion on the Andrew Marr show. Nigel Farage is on and he says that for he first time UKIP have passed LibDems in the polls.

The Sunday papers are full of talk about splits between LibDems and Cons.

Simon Jenkins says we are just at the prologue of a very long play and it is very hard to see what wil happen next in our relationship with Europe.

On a different note- I think this may have given a huge boost to the SNP in any independence referendum. Quite a few people I have talked to who were ambivalent about independence are now saying they would vote yes now the government has made its Little Englander mentality so clear. Maybe Cameron will preside over the break up of Britain as well. Wonder if he'll be so proud of that?
Apologies if someone has mentioned this before but I could't be arsed reading the arguments over BSE.

Am I right in thinking Clegg said the coalition were united on this last Friday? I really, really, really hope I am.
Merry Christmas!

Clegg's pretty fucked off, judging by his stance on the Andrew Marr show.

The Politics Show also reports that Vince Cable warned Cameron not to into the talks with deal-breakers.

I don't think some people here understand the implications of the UK moving towards isolation from and possibly pulling out of the EU. It will be a fucking disaster.

I read somewhere that the tax the EU wanted to put on financial transactions was O.O5% which to use their own words seems to me like 'a drop in the ocean'. I Keep hearing DC saying he was protecting british interests, but apart from Sarkosy saying DC wanted Britain (the banks) to be exempt from this tax, I fail to see what other interests he was seeking to protect x

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the veto what's really getting to me is the way that the French and Germans are seeking to take the moral high ground by slagging off Cameron, when it is clear they are also acting on what they see as their own national interests. They are the main players in a system which has set rules that it consistently breaks, such as fudging figures to allow in countries that should not have been in the first place e.g. Greece to it's latest little wheeze...it's agreement to "lend" 200bn to the IMF via states' central banks, which the IMF can then lend back to states. Knowing that member states would hit problems in their own parliaments if they called on them to fund the IMF directly the EZ will round trip the cash by going via central banks. So much for high moral ground.

Did anyone also notice the agreement slip through to drop any demands for private sector holders of dodgy EZ sovereign debts to stand losses? What was that they were saying about moral hazard?

And can anyone explain how the latest decisions for fiscal harmony are very different from the stability and growth pact at the time the euro was launched - subsequently quickly breached by both France and Germany?

As the months unfold I suspect quite a few national parliaments may be saying "hang on a moment....."

Déja vu anyone?

another aspect - the Germans will enforce austerity across the Eurozone. That's their thing for historical reasons. But you can't cut your way out of a recession - slashing government spending at the same time as the private sector contracts cuts consumer and industrial demand, which causes further contraction in a spiral of decline. So the Eurozone will very likely be locked into this disastrous pattern. Unless they fiddle the figures, and they have form on this - including Germany and France. We could be better off in the sense of not being tied into austerity, and having the freedom of a democratic sovereign nation to set our own budgets (which the Eurozone nations have surrendered). Equally, if the Eurozone contracts, that depresses some of our key export markets... so who knows where all this will end up.

Any which way, it's probably bad news. European economies contract, while the emerging international powers of China, India, Brazil and Russia grow stronger, economically and politically. The two most powerful of those aren't democracies, and have appalling human rights records. And they will be competing with us for resources, forcing up prices that we can't afford to pay.

I am horrified and frightened by Cameron's actions. He has not managed to protect the City and had almost certainly severely damaged it.

The treaty that Cameron vetoed would not have affected the City. The issue of the Tobin tax was not part of the Treaty, and can still go ahead. he has NOT stopped it nor any of the other regulations.

The Treaty was to rescue the Eurozone. He tried to hold the Eurozone to ransom unless they made some changes to existing regulations. He stated that he would not allow the others to put in place measures to rescue the Eurozone unless they changed existing policy on financial regulation. That is, he tried to take advantage of the EU crisis for his own ends. This is despicable - akin to refusing to take an injured man to hospital until he gives you his wallet. With that attitude I am not surprised that they told him to go away. The French and Germans are right to take the moral high ground.

Britain's ability to stop any of the financial regulations is now much weaker than before. In order to stop them, we need to get other countries onside. Given Cameron's actions, who would want to help him? In any case, Cameron will not be there when others are negotiating. If you are not at the table, you cannot influence it.

The logic of Cameron's actions is to leave the EU altogether. This would be an economic disaster for the City. Many foreign banks are in the City as this is a good way to access the world's largest market - the EU. With Britain on its own, this attraction will go. Plus don't forget the business service sector, which largely exists to service the EU. And manufacturing etc... We will be Iceland without the fish.

The worst thing is, that exiting the EU may no longer be Britain's decision. He is forcing the others to set up new institutions which Britain will not be part of. There may be no way back.

I see at last that some sane people are joining the discussion. Roastchicken, exactly right. As for the idjits above who think we can go back to trading with the Commonwealth, dream on. It's only too obvious that we will be crawling back to Merkel and Sarko in a few weeks at much more disadvantageous terms. IF we're lucky, and all the signs are that we may not belucky - welcome to Ecuador, people. People who aren't still longing for vanished glory should go and read Will Hutton's piece in the Guardian. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/11/will-hutton-david-cameron-wrong-on-europe?INTCMP=SRCH

Agree entirely Roastchicken.

What may happen next is a volte face by Cameron as the City puts its pov to him. (Government policy dictated by the unelected as mentioned above). Or Cameron swallows hard and leads Britain out of the EU despite the City. If so, get used to the loud sucking sound as money makes its way out of the country towards Moscow, Beijing, and New York (the US is every bit as much of an every man for himself player as the others are).

(And I really think Enda Kenny should wake up and take a long hard look at whatever it is he thinks he's doing in the present circumstances.)