UK to EU: ‘let’s be friends’
AFP PHOTO/Noah SEELAM
London mayor Boris Johnson has said that the UK should radically alter its relationship with the European Union.
Speaking in London on 4 December, the Eurosceptic Conservative mayor, seen as a potential leadership challenger to prime minister David Cameron, himself to speak on Europe later, said that the UK’s relationship with the EU should be based instead on the principles of free trade, without being tied to a wider political union.
He said the EU should focus on the completion of the single market.
“We want to be friends”, Johnson said, adding that the UK should “not endlessly be made to feel bad for not sharing every doctrine of the Euro religion”. He said it is possible to reach this “Nirvana”.
He said that the UK should push for a treaty change with Europe, and added that Britain has constantly “warned you publicly about the euro...and we we’re right”. Chronic uncertainty in the Eurozone is “choking off growth”, he said, adding that although it is a not member of the single currency, the UK is “paying a heavy price” for its flagging performance.
“We need a new relationship, and further treaty changes”, he said. “We need to boil it down to the single market – we could easily scrap the social charter or fisheries policy, for instance”. He said if the UK pushed for dramatic changes, it was not inconceivable that others would join them, including non-EU members like Norway and Switzerland.
Johnson said it was “high time” Britain held a referendum on its relationship with the EU, not a straightforward in-out question, and option he had initially said he favoured, “do you want to stay in the EU single market as renegotiated, yes or no?” Should the vote be no, he said, then citizens could “exercise their sovereign right to leave the EU”.
He said that Britain’s European partners would be happy “to do a deal” like this, as “they need us”. He said that “I don’t think we would be punished or blamed for seeking this change”. Instead, he said that a newly-negotiated relationship would be “friendly”, and based on “breaking down trade barriers”.
He said that the UK should look not simply at Europe, but at more trade with global markets. “We should be trading freely with the EU, but with our eyes on the great emerging markets”, he said. new europe on line
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