LONDON: Britain should leave the European Union because Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan to claw back powers from Brussels is doomed, former finance minister Nigel Lawson said.
Lawson’s intervention piles pressure on Cameron just days after his Conservative Party was shaken in local elections by the surging anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP).
Cameron came to power in a coalition government in 2010 with a plea to his party to “stop banging on about Europe”, an issue that has divided the Conservatives for decades and helped bring down two of his predecessors, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
But his promise in January to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership and to hold an “in-out” referendum if he is re-elected in 2015 has failed to stop party squabbling over Europe or halt UKIP’s rise. Lawson, who served as Thatcher’s finance minister from 1983 to 1989, is the most senior member of Cameron’s Conservative Party to call for Britain to withdraw from the EU.
Cameron’s attempts to repatriate powers from Brussels would probably only secure “inconsequential” results, Lawson said, echoing warnings from France and Germany. Britain would be better off outside a 27-nation bloc that has become a “bureaucratic monstrosity”, he wrote in Monday’s Times newspaper.
“I strongly suspect that there would be a positive economic advantage to the UK in leaving the single market,” Lawson wrote in an article that stirred memories of a Conservative civil war over Europe that raged for large parts of the 1980s and 1990s. “In my judgement the economic gains would substantially outweigh the costs.”
Reuters
