09/02/2016
Although the BSE campaign and its fellow-travellers have been pouring out a non-stop torrent of FUD, the Prime Minister â as effective leader of the "remains" - has not been amongst those prominent in the use of scare tactics.
For him then to come out with a scare story about the
Le Touquet Treaty, and its possible discontinuance if we leave the EU, is something of a new development.
As it stands, the treaty can be ended at any time by written notification, the termination taking effect two years after the date of the notification. Thus it is always possible that the French could end the treaty if we leave the EU, perhaps giving notice at the same time we sent our Article 50 notification to Brussels.
However, outside the EU â and in any event â we could repudiate the 1951 Convention on the Treatment of Refugees (and the 1967 Protocol), and also the European Convention on Human Rights. Freed of such obligations, we would be well-positioned to counter any action taken against the UK. Should the French allow migrant free access to the ports (and Channel Tunnel), we could simply pack them on a return ferry and send them back to France.
This could perhaps lead to an unedifying situation with one or more ferries carrying thousands of refugees shunting between British and French ports, prohibited from discharging at either, until one or other of the parties blinked.
For this to happen would be no more in the interest of the French than the British. It was in the interests of regularising the situation that the French signed the treaty in the first place.
Even without it, there are carrier liability provisions in place which impose heavy fines on ferry companies and Eurotunnel for permitting access to undocumented passengers. So, treaty or not, large numbers of would-be asylum seekers would be denied passage. As a result, you would be seeing camps spring up in Calais, just as they did before the Le Touquet Treaty.
With the treaty in place, the French have a considerable degree of leverage over the British. They have been able to extract, via the Evian Arrangements, many millions in cash from the British taxpayer, to assist the Calais authorities in dealing with the problem.
For various reasons, therefore, it is likely that treaty would remain in place after the UK left the EU â for the very reasons that such treaties are upheld. They are, as
White Wednesday points out, beneficial to both parties.
Therefore, that Mr Cameron should choose an issue so transparent a scare story that even Vote Leave could see though it suggests something more profound than just opportunistic propagandising. Either he is losing his grip or he is changing his tactics.
Here, one should note that the comments were made in a prepared speech to the Policy Exchange on prison reform. They were flagged up well in advance, sufficient for newspapers to run overnight headlines on the "scare".
This points to premeditation, supporting a view that we are seeing a deliberate change in the "play". And there are further indications of this being the case in this
Guardian piece, where Mr Cameron talks of the value of EU membership in assisting our fight against terrorism.
But if we're seeing a change in pace, that might have considerable implications for the referendum campaign. Rather than play the "deal" card and go for an early (June) referendum, relying on a poll boost from public approval, the Prime Minister might have decided to play the long game (if that had not always been his intention).
The point at issue here is that Mr Cameron could expect a boost of twenty points of more from bringing a deal back from Brussels which the public perceived as "good", contrasted with a smaller but none-the-less significant boost to the leavers in the event of the deal being seen as poor.
Given that we have seen various polls giving the advantage to the leavers, at a point where a change in sentiment might actually mean something, this could be enough to convince Mr Cameron to return to safer territory and argue the broader case for EU membership.
This, necessarily, would require Mr Cameron to put distance between him and the deal to be brokered in Brussels in ten day's time. If this is his "play", then we must expect some downbeat mood music over the next week or so, preparatory to an orchestrated failure of the "summit". This piece from
the BBC on Portugal might be an early example.
Most likely, there will be some carefully stage-managed objections, followed by Mr Cameron adopting a "battling for Britain" pose and rejecting the deal â thus buying him time to build on his alternative scenario. He could then come back some time later with a marginally better deal and thus claim victory.
This then puts into perspective the way Mr Cameron is gaming the designation process, brought into high profile by a piece from Asa Bennett in the
Telegraph. By keeping the rival leave campaigns in the dark as to when he will start the designation, they are forced to devote their energies to the designation competition, rather than the main campaign.
In particular, Mr Bennett has
picked up on the possibility that Mr Cameron could fold the six-week designation process into the 10-week referendum period, leaving only four weeks for the campaign proper.
Interestingly, after Booker had
raised this possibility, we were referred to a debate
in the Lords when Ukip's Lord Willoughby de Broke gained from FCO minister Baroness Anelay an assurance that this would not happen.
On 18 November last year, she stated that "the referendum period will be a minimum of 10 weeks and in advance of that is the designation period". The Baroness went on to say: "The two cannot be conflated ⦠there is no way of concertinaing it, if I can put it that way".
That contradicts a typically ill-informed piece on the
BBC website which states (wrongly) that the Electoral Commission will publish details of the designation process once David Cameron has named the date for the referendum. As we know, there does not have to be any linkage between designation and the referendum date.
The BBC suggests that Mr Cameron could make an announcement as early as Monday 22 February, "if a deal on his draft renegotiation package is agreed by EU leaders the previous weekend". But, as long as the designation is not folded into the referendum period, his deadline for a referendum on 23 June is on 9 March.
Allowing that Baroness Anelay is calling it correctly (although there seems no legal bar to a later date), if by 9 March the designation process has not started, then there cannot be a referendum on 23 June.
However, even if the regulations are laid by this date, that does not mean there will be an early referendum. Mr Cameron could call for early designation and then still leave the referendum until next year. In this context, it should be noted that in the Scottish referendum, the campaigns were designated on 23 April 2014, with the referendum held just under five months later on 18 September.
If Mr Cameron is playing the long game, he could launch the designation period early and then leave the campaign groups on tenterhooks, leaving the announcement of the referendum date to the minimum ten weeks before the poll, perhaps at the need of August 2017, for an October poll.
Significantly, though, the Electoral Commission has already put the main campaigns on notice to prepare preliminary submissions for designation by March, which suggests that there is not going to be a formal announcement any time soon.
That also would make sense, as it is to Mr Cameron's tactical advantage to have the rival leave campaigns fighting each other for as long as possible. And even when that battle is over, there is
the exit plan to agree â an issue which the "leave" camps have been evading and which could spark an even bigger battle.
All in all, it seems, we're back in Northern Irish political territory where it is said of the political situation, if you think you know what's going on, you haven't been listening. But that notwithstanding, my money's still on the long game.
