David Cameron has been told by an influential German MEP that Britain will need to forfeit its veto in European Union decision-taking if it wants to be exempted from the EU’s definition as an “ever closer union”.



If there is a request for an opt-out for the UK, we can ask for compensation Manfred Weber

Manfred Weber, the politician who leads the bloc of European Christian Democrats, met the UK prime minister last Friday to discuss the referendum and British negotiations with the rest of the EU, which have been gathering steam since the general election.

Weber said Cameron’s demand that ever closer union should not apply to Britain could be accommodated by a special “protocol” to the EU treaties enshrining a UK opt-out.

“But if there is a request for an opt-out for the UK, we can ask for compensation,” he said. “If the British want an opt-out, the rest of the union can ask that they lose their veto on the system. They cannot have the right to block the others if the others want to go forward. We should add [to any opt-out] that Britain has in the future no right to use its veto in any domain if the others go further [in integration].”

As part of his campaign to secure concessions from other EU leaders before putting Britain’s membership to a referendum by the end of 2017, the prime minister is demanding that “ever closer union”, seen by UK Eurosceptics as a federalist formula, be struck from the EU treaties or at least that Britain be allowed to “opt out” of the concept.

With the UK-EU negotiations set to become much more substantive at a Brussels summit later this month, Weber’s comments were the first time it had been mooted that Britain could lose its veto in EU decision-taking as the price for rewriting the membership terms.

Apart from Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president who dined at Chequers last week, Weber is the sole EU politician to have been hosted in London by Cameron on the referendum issue since the Conservatives’ election triumph.

Weber will not be directly involved in the decisions taken, which will fall to national leaders. But he often reflects the thinking of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who takes the European parliament seriously. That Weber was invited to Downing Street suggests that Cameron wants to woo the European parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg. He is also expected to discuss the referendum with Martin Schulz, the German social democrat and parliamentary speaker.

Cameron is to lay out his shopping list on the EU in much greater detail at a Brussels summit on 25 June when Donald Tusk, the European council president chairing the summit, will invite the prime minister to deliver a presentation.

EU national leaders at the summit are then expected to charge Tusk and Juncker with conducting the negotiations with the British, asking that they report on the results to another summit just before Christmas.

On the substantive points already disclosed by Cameron, senior sources in Brussels say the prime minister will not get far in his drive to freeze for four years the in-work and unemployment benefits for EU workers newly arrived in Britain. This is seen as discriminatory and would require arduous renegotiation of EU treaties.

Berlin, however, is keen to strike agreement with Britain on new measures curbing child benefits or family allowances for non-native EU workers.

Weber said the negotiations with the British and the UK referendum were “a chance, not a problem, for Europe”. Some of the Cameron’s proposals were positive, particularly a crackdown on alleged social security abuse by non-native EU citizens. “Some of the ideas are really good and are welcome,” he said. But Weber stressed there were limits to what the rest of Europe would countenance.

On ever closer union, he said: “I would not start by accepting [the UK premise]. I would start by defending the idea. The wording is ever ‘closer union of peoples’ – we are not talking about states or institutions. The idea that this means everything should be decided in Brussels is wrong.

“We are saying our peoples should be in an ever closer relationship and union. We should very strongly defend the ideal behind ever closer union and talk about our understanding of it and not accept the definition Cameron and the British are presenting because it is wrong.”