Negotiations that could decide Britain’s future in the European Union remain in the balance after all-night meetings in Brussels ended without any form of a deal.

David Cameron left talks with European Council president Donald Tusk and commission president Jean-Claude Juncker at 5.30am (CET), making no comment. Further discussions are reportedly scheduled for 9am.

Tusk and Cameron are expected to review progress at 11.45am (10.45am GMT), and the full council session is supposed to start around 12.30pm (11.30am GMT).



Cameron has been warned by EU leaders that he would not be given a second chance if he failed to strike an agreement at the gathering of 28 heads of government.

Shortly before the talks broke up Tusk, a key broker in the negotiations, said: “For now I can only say that we have made some progress but a lot needs to be done.”

There appear to be number of key sticking points which have so far prevented Britain reaching a deal with its European partners.

They include the duration of the so-called “emergency brake” to restrict in-work benefits for EU migrants in the UK; curbs on child benefit for EU migrants whose children are not in the UK; and potential treaty changes to exempt formally the UK from the goal of “ever-closer union” and to underpin protections for non-eurozone members.

In the early hours of Friday, European leaders offered differing verdicts on any hope of a deal, with Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi saying he was “less optimistic” than he had been. Finnish prime minister Juha Sipilä suggested an agreement would be struck by Friday, echoing Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, who said things were “going well”. But Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte raised the possibility of talks running into Saturday.

Donald Tusk says of the talks that a lot remains to be done. Guardian

Away from Britain’s future in Europe there was some progress at Thursday’s summit on the refugee crisis, with Tusk and German chancellor Angela Merkel declaring it a priority, and calling a fresh extraordinary summit with Turkey, most likely in early March.

“The important statement for me today is that we have not only reaffirmed the EU-Turkey action plan, but we have said it is our priority,” Merkel said of the plan to address migration and border controls.

Merkel noted Austria backed the plan, despite its unilateral decision to introduce daily caps on migrants. “In Europe we are all always partners,” she said.

Cameron has embarked on the biggest gamble of his premiership as he seeks to put Britain’s place in Europe on a permanently new footing.

Speaking at the beginning of the two-day summit, he said it was an opportunity to settle Britain’s troubled relationship with the EU for a generation after claiming the issue had been allowed to “fester for too long”.

He told the national leaders present the EU should function on the basis of “live and let live”, allowing countries including the UK to remain a full member while standing back from moves towards greater integration, outlining an argument that is expected to continue until the UK referendum widely expected on 23 June.

The prime minister warned EU leaders that he was prepared to walk away from the summit without a deal on Friday if they failed to give ground on a series of fronts and allow him to present a “credible” set of reforms to the British people. In ill-tempered exchanges, the prime minister told European leaders that they need to match supportive rhetoric in favour of British membership of the EU with action to meet his needs.

Cameron antagonised the east Europeans on Thursday night by demanding a 13-year period in which Britain would be allowed to freeze in-work benefits for EU migrants in the UK for four years. This is highly unlikely to be accepted.

Merkel was unqualified in supporting Cameron’s pitch for a new settlement as she arrived at the summit but French president François Hollande said Cameron was being offered a take-it-or-leave-it deal.

The German chancellor, who views the the British issue as a distraction from her much more pressing dilemmas over mass immigration in Germany and Europe, said: “We want to create the conditions for Britain to remain in the EU.”

Hollande was much more equivocal . “It’s the European Union being put into question, not merely a country within the European Union,” he said.

“Above all I want the European Union to go forward, become stronger. No one, not a head of government or state may hinder that. Let’s allow Great Britain to remain in the European Union but based on the fundamental principles.

“Otherwise, other nations will demand other exceptions. Countries may ask other amended rules of their own. Therefore when we’re speaking with Great Britain, we have to think of all the other [member] countries.”

While the prospect of Britain quitting the EU weighed heavily on the crucial summit, there was also growing impatience in Berlin, Paris and elsewhere that the British question had to be answered conclusively in talks that were expected to continue to run.

A failure to reach a deal would mean EU leaders would probably reconvene within the next 10 days to ensure a referendum can be held by 23 June. But No 10 may be seeking to portray the prime minister as isolated and battling for Britain to allow him to hail a deal on Friday as a historic victory.

If a deal is secured he will fly back to London after a Brussels media conference to chair a cabinet meeting at which he will say the government will formally endorse the deal. But such a meeting would also lead to the suspension of collective cabinet responsibility, allowing at least five cabinet ministers to campaign for a no vote. The key players would be Boris Johnson, a member of the political cabinet, and Michael Gove, who have both signalled that they are conflicted on the issue.

Hollande’s statement that Britain could not be allowed to create a precedent encouraging others to plead for special changes reflected a Franco-Belgian gambit defining the referendum as the UK’s last chance to settle its European destiny.



Cameron signalled his support for the idea, although it was unclear whether such a formula would be adopted by the summit. British officials said they were interested in the proposal, drawn up by the Belgians and supported by the French, that would make clear that Britain could not seek to further renegotiate the terms of its EU membership if the UK were to vote to leave in the referendum.

The proposal would kill off a plan by Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings, arguing that a second referendum could be held after two years of severance negotiations if the UK were to vote to leave.

There will be suspicions that the UK has at the very least nudged Belgium, the country keenest to forge a federal Europe and no friend of Britain in the negotiations, to make clear that the vote will be final and definitive, a message the Better Together camp sought to promote during the Scottish independence referendum.

The prime minister told fellow leaders: “The question of Britain’s place in Europe has been allowed to fester for too long. It is time to deal with it. If we can reach agreement here that is strong enough to persuade the British people to support the UK in membership of the EU, then we have an opportunity to settle this issue for a generation.

“It is an opportunity to move to a fundamentally different approach to our relationship with the EU, what some might call a ‘live and let live’, reflecting that those states who wish to integrate further can do so while those of us that don’t can be reassured that their interests will be protected and will not need to fight these at every turn on a case-by-case event-by-event issue.”

The prize of a successful outcome to the summit was a big one, Cameron said. But the package agreed had to be credible for the British, meaning that progress has to be made in the areas that are causing difficulty. They are the need for:

• Treaty change to underpin new protections for non-eurozone members in the single market. France is deeply concerned that the UK is seeking to carve out special protections for the City of London and seeking to freeze rules governing the financial sector, effectively hobbling the eurozone’s freedom of manoeuvre. EU sources said Hollande would go on the attack over financial regulation, while Mario Draghi, the powerful head of the European Central Bank responsible for the euro, was expected to try to broker a compromise.

• Treaty change to make clear that the UK is exempted from the EU’s founding declaration to forge an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe. Britain’s opt-out from future political integration will be granted but several countries remain reluctant to change the treaty.

• Agreement on the length of an emergency brake that can be imposed to restrict in-work benefits for EU migrants in Britain for up to four years. Britain accepts that this is unlikely to last for more than three years and will be phased out after the first year. This is essentially agreed, apart from the timeframes, but is complicated by a bigger argument over welfare curbs.

• This concerns clarification on the “applicability” of changes to child benefit paid to EU immigrant workers who leave their offspring at home. Poland in particular insists that these new rules can only apply to new cases and should only apply to Britain. The prime minister, who had hoped to ban all EU migrants from claiming child benefit, has now accepted that it will be paid at a rate linked to the cost of living in their home country, insists that the cuts are applied to EU migrants currently receiving the benefits.

The Polish government had threatened to veto the entire package if the child benefits cuts were made “retroactive” and applied across the EU. But legally the new rules have to be EU-wide.

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“You can’t have a Lex Britannica,” said a senior EU source. Under a proposed compromise, the other countries will be given an “option” to apply the new rules which they will then decline. Whether that is sufficiently watertight for the Poles remained unclear.

The prime minister issued his plea to EU leaders after saying that he was “battling for Britain” as he arrived in Brussels.

“I’ll be battling for Britain. If we can get a good deal I’ll take that deal,” he said. “But I will not take a deal that doesn’t meet what we need. I think it’s much more important to get this right than to do anything in a rush. But with goodwill, with hard work, we can get a better deal for Britain.”

Chairing the summit, the European council’s president, Donald Tusk, said all sides were still in the middle of “very difficult and sensitive negotiations” adding: “One thing is clear to me: this is a make-or-break summit.”