EU referendum: Cameron to hold new round of talks with European leaders

 

 

David Cameron is to stage another round of separate meetings with European leaders this autumn that will be critical to determining whether he thinks he can go ahead with a referendum next year or should instead wait until 2017.
He said the negotiations would determine the date of the referendum, not the other way round. The chancellor, George Osborne, is also holding talks in Paris on Monday with his French counterparts.
Cameron said technical discussions were now well under way in Brussels to work on the legal parameters of a deal, and these were going well. The weekly analytical discussions are looking at the legal form to the changes the UK is seeking and whether they would require treaty change, primary legislation or something more modest.
Cameron has accepted that treaty change would not be possible by next year but he could still win a legally binding agreement in writing that treaty change would follow once other EU states had finished their own negotiations about revising governance in the euro area.
But Cameron wants a further round of talks with key European leaders such as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, at the end of September to test out how quickly a deal can be struck. He will be able to make a preliminary judgment at an autumn European council meeting but the council’s December get-together is more likely to determine if the prime minister feels he needs to go short or long on the referendum date.
Cameron plans to see Merkel just before the Conservative conference starting on 4 October and the EU council of heads of state on 15-16 October. The timing gives him a chance to reveal to a restive conference the state of the negotiations, and the issues on which he is still pressing.