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[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/defeatingisis/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Rob Oxley discuss David Cameron’s EU negotiations so far” startat=1493] Listen [/audioplayer]We have just had a very insular general election campaign, but the mood at Westminster is now determined by news from foreign capitals. There was a flurry of excitement last Wednesday when the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaüble, suggested linking the British renegotiation to eurozone reform. It led to much talk of a European ‘Grand Bargain’, with Germany and the northern European countries given greater supervision of eurozone finances, the French and the southern Europeans given an explicit, written commitment to ‘solidarity’ within the currency union, and the British offered single-market protections, an opt-out

It seems every week now there is a story about France and/or Germany ruling out EU treaty change and thereby putting pay to David Cameron’s EU reform push before it has even really begun. While this makes for good headlines, the reality is much more nuanced. Take today’s example: A leaked preliminary draft of a Franco-German paper on Eurozone reform reported by Le Monde and picked up by the Guardian, stated that in the short term (the next few years) the countries will focus on working within the EU treaties, which has been seen as a blow to Cameron’s reform push. There are some important points to keep in mind

The three main Labour leadership candidates have now all said that they want a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU. But the party’s ‘official’ position – that is, the policy it went into the last election with that everyone seems quite keen to disown – is that there should not be a referendum. The party will not have chosen its leader by the time of next week’s Queen’s Speech, even if MPs seem to be making their minds up pretty quickly, and so when the EU referendum bill is published in that speech, the party will need to respond. It would perhaps make sense if that response wasn’t a

In today’s Guardian, Matthew D’Ancona warns that David Cameron may face a successful rebellion from the ‘Runnymede Tories’ if he tries to repeal the Human Rights Act, led by David Davis. Not only would that be a major blow to his authority, it would make remaining in the EU a less attractive option in the forthcoming referendum. Human Rights experts insist that the two issues are wholly separate, although that’s open to debate. But there’s no doubt they’re politically linked. In the minds of some sections of the British public, a good argument for withdrawing from the EU will be to escape the jurisdiction of the European Court – they

Up until Thursday night, everything that David Cameron and George Osborne had done in government had had to be agreed by the Liberal Democrats. Every policy had to go through the ‘Quad’, the coalition government’s decision making body made up of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander. That doesn’t have to happen anymore. As one Downing Street figure says: ‘It is all completely different now, we can power forward with what we want to do. There’s no need for everything to be watered down. It’s invigorating’. Not having to manage a coalition, also frees up huge amounts of time for both Cameron and the Number 10 operation. It would be well

Amidst the hullabaloo of the general election campaign, one thing that has generally gone unnoticed in Britain’s political discourse is the worsening Greek situation. You now have European finance ministers openly talking about the possibility of a Greek default. What has changed is that there is now no goodwill and very little trust between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. The rest of the Eurozone think that the Greeks are obfuscating and not providing the details needed. While the Syriza-led Greek government feel that the rest of the Eurozone is not providing them with the political cover they need to make a deal. They feel that the Eurozone’s insistence

The election campaign is becoming increasingly dominated by a small party whose raison d’être is to preach independence from membership of a union it claims is hindering national ambition. But the party is not Ukip, which had been expected to play a big role in this election. It is the Scottish National Party, which seems ever more likely to hold the balance of power after 7 May and is determined to use it ruthlessly to its own advantage and to the furtherance of its sole objective: the dissolution of the United Kingdom. Nicola Sturgeon has been the only party leader talking about the virtues of national self-government, and she has

Philip Hammond was noticeably keen this afternoon to show the government isn’t standing idly by while migrants drown in the Mediterranean – especially as the refugee crisis is the global story of the moment; the pictures and reports severe enough to have momentarily knocked the election campaign off a number of front pages. Appearing on today’s Daily Politics debate on international affairs, the Foreign Secretary stressed the need for a ‘more formidable operation on the sea’, and said that David Cameron would head to Brussels on Thursday to call for an ‘enhanced operation’ to prevent any further crises. Mr Hammond said: ‘Of course we’ve got to support search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.

Helge Lund was widely expected to go into domestic politics when he ended his successful tenure as head of Statoil, the Norwegian state oil and gas company. Instead, he was hired to run BG Group, the troubled former exploration arm of British Gas, but on a promise of such ludicrously rich terms — up to ten times his Statoil salary — that shareholders, the media and Vince Cable howled in protest. An embarrassed BG board had to scale back the offer, though it remained pretty fat and as I wrote at the time, ‘no mention of Lund, however good he turns out to be, will ever omit a jibe at

Fair play to Ed Miliband for launching Labour’s business manifesto today in Bloomberg, not perhaps the party’s natural stamping ground, at least not since the prawn cocktail initiative in 1997. And it was gutsy of it too to take out a full page advertisement in the FT – they don’t come cheap – to broadcast the party’s opposition to an EU referendum. ‘The biggest risk to British business is the threat of an EU exit. Labour will put the national interest first. We will deliver reform, not exit’, it says. Granted most British businesses, especially big ones and foreign-based ones, don’t want out of the EU. But doesn’t it seem