The reaction to Cameron’s speech promising a referendum is coming in thick and fast. It is increasingly clear that a promise of an in-out referendum if the UK cannot renegotiate is a gamble which he is sure to lose.

However there is a way out. The EU is constantly evolving, through discussion and debate, and the UK is part of those ongoing debates. It will be perfectly possible for the government to say that it had been involved in those renegotiations and the outcome was satisfactory, so vote IN, but these will not be negotiations to achieve special and separate treatment for the UK.

Farming Today, an excellent Radio 4 programme, dealt at length with the implications of leaving the EU. Negotiations are currently taking place on the regime for funding and supporting farmers throughout Europe. From hard experience during the farming depression of the 1930s we learned that farmers had to be protected from the dumping of surplus crops grown elsewhere. The EU has progressively evolved a farming policy which supports  prosperous agriculture and we no longer have the butter mountains and the wine lakes. To say that we want to withdraw from Europe would involve either implementing EU rules, but without the support, or working out our own rules and support mechanisms. What is worse is that we would have no say in the evolution of new frameworks for managing agriculture. Not surprisingly all the farmers  interviewed were very keen that the UK should stay in the EU.

 

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