In my main post on Cameron’s EU debacle earlier, I noted how the European Union Act 2011, pushed through by Cameron as a way of deflecting attention from his failure to live up to his “cast iron” guarantee on a referendum, is likely to come back to haunt him.
It occurs to me that one part of his speech illustrates this cock-up perfectly. Cameron asks:
And I would ask: when the competitiveness of the single market is so important, why is there an environment council, a transport council, an education council but not a single market council?
So Cameron apparently wants an addiitional institution within the EU to coordinate single market policy. I’m not sure why, but let’s take him at his word.
Now, the function of the transport council, which he refers to by way of comparison, is set out at Articles 90 to 96 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Similarly, if a single market were to be established as a result Cameron’s negotiating brilliance, it would also require inclusion within a revised TFEU if it were to have legitimacy
But the European Union Act 2011 makes ot very clear that a change to TFEU which entails “the extension of the competence of the EU in relation to cooridnation of economic and employment policies” (sec 4 (f) will require a referendum for its ratification.
So if Cameron were successful in negotiating a new Single Market coordination function, AND if legislation were introduced for an in/out referendum, we’d be stuck, by law, with two referenda, potentially weeks apart.
