Random Thoughts on Recent Events
Random Thoughts on Recent Events

Summary/Abstract: In his memoir of the Thatcher administration, Nigel Lawson, her Finance Minister, gives a droll explanation of the Foreign Office’s reasoning on the proper use of the veto in European Union deliberations. The survival of the veto was a vital British interest, ran the FO line. So whenever any other country used the veto, the FO thought that Britain should support it irrespective of the merits of any particular case. On the other hand, Britain should never cast a veto in its own cause because that might put the veto at risk. Hardly surprisingly, David Cameron’s decision on 10 December to veto the establishment of a new fiscal union of seventeen Euro-land countries within the EU treaty structure was the first occasion when a British leader has actually cast a veto to defend vital British interests.

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