David Cameron’s plan for this autumn was to largely avoid the topic of Europe at his party’s conference, then to focus on the issue later in the year. It’s only a few days since the Tories gathered in Birmingham, and the Prime Minister is already facing a big week on Europe.
Home Secretary Theresa May will kick things off by announcing today that she wants Britain to opt out of more than 130 European Union measures on law and order, including the European Arrest Warrant. The opt-out itself, which the Home Secretary is expected to say Britain is ‘minded’ to do, is not the tricky bit: it’s which measures to then opt back into. The Liberal Democrats will be keen for the government to return to many more measures than Conservative ministers are prepared to do, and in turn ministers may be minded to opt back in to more measures than eurosceptic Tory backbenchers would like.
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