02/12/2014
Two Swiss referendums on Sunday had their own special importance, the one on boosting gold reserves having special interest to the global finance community â enough to spark an international price run.
But of special interest to us was the referendum on immigration, the second one this year. The proposal, called "Ecopop", sought to reduce immigration on environmental grounds, capping it at just 0.2 percent of the resident population, this reducing inflow from about 80,000 to 16,000 people a year.
Reuters, though,
had it that the referendum was been seen as a proxy vote on Switzerland's raft of treaties with the EU, then announcing that voters had overwhelmingly rejected the proposal.
Also joining the fray was
the BBC, which tells us that all 26 cantons voted against the measure, with about 74 percent of the electorate rejecting the proposition. By any measure, this is decisive, especially when 78.4 percent voted for tougher asylum laws in June
last year, and 50.3 percent of voters backed the so-called "Stop mass immigration" initiative of
last February.
Since the February vote, the Swiss government has been embroiled in a constitutional crisis, where execution of the referendum would conflict with the
1999 Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, which
came into force in June 2002.
The referendum had
called into question the EU-Swiss agreement, requesting that the Swiss Federal Council "renegotiate" this agreement with the EU. Implementing legislation for this initiative has to be enacted by the Federal Council within three years, with the Council indicating that the first stage of the legislative process (
Vernehmlassung, comparable to a Green Paper) would be carried out this year.
Breaching the agreement, however, risked bringing into play the
guillotine clause, ending the entire package of EU-Swiss trade agreements.
Thus, as with the EEA agreement, we have another example of where free trade with the EU is conditional on free movement. In this case, the conditions are actually more demanding than the EEA requirements (opening up residence rights, for instance, to family members).
Now, according to legend, faced with this prospect, the Swiss people have backed off from full-frontal confrontation with the EU. The scene is now set for a further clawback over the February referendum.
For the UK, these developments have considerable significance. Firstly, they underline the point that all the free trade agreements between the EU and its Northern European neighbours are conditional on free movement agreements. This suggests that the UK is unlikely to get a deal from the EU that does not also have similar requirements.
Secondly, the developments would appear to indicate that, when given the choice between losing their market access with the EU and limiting immigration, the people plumped for market access. Certainly, the result is being presented in this light.
This may have broader implications. Switzerland peered over the precipice and retreated from the brink. Thus, even though immigration can take pole position for a while, that does not necessarily mean that it will remain there and that it cannot be displaced. In other words, there is life after immigration, even without concessions to public sentiment.
Meanwhile, deeper in the woods, there are other things stirring.
The Times,
last week reported on the promulgation of a new law in Germany which removed the right of residence from migrant jobseekers after six months, if they have no job and no prospect of work. Fraudsters caught cheating the system will be banned for up to five years.
Under the new law, parents were also to be stopped from claiming child benefit unless they could present of a German tax number, to guard against double claiming in Germany and their home country.
According to
The Times, none of these reforms challenge EU law, and that does seems
to be the case. But it does indicate a change in the wind. A national authority is taking formal action to deal with migrants, even though the effects will probably be minimal.
Translate the Swiss and German experience into the UK and we have an interesting possibility. On the one hand, there is scope for the level of public concern on immigration to slide down the list of priorities â even without real or any actual decline in the rate. On the other, there is an opening for national governments to take more rigorous actions against certain migrants, helping the slide.
What this effectively says is that, from its present high, immigration can slide down the political agenda â and even more so if Mr Cameron goes to Brussels and "battles for Britain", bringing home a treaty.
In terms of any forthcoming referendum, though, while we have been confident in the expectation that Mr Cameron could not walk away with a treaty, we have suddenly to confront an alternative outcome â he will succeed. It will be a poor little thing, dragged from the depths of Article 48 and the "simplified procedure", but a treaty nonetheless.
Having put all its eggs in one basket, Ukip cannot survive immigration being taken off the list. It will rob the party of its rationale. But when Mr Cameron's great "success" on immigration is taken to have "solved" the larger EU problem, Ukip will have dug the grave of the entire Eurosceptic movement. The focus on immigration will lose us the entire referendum.
