George Osborne: don't make UK choose between joining euro or leaving EU

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/wintour-and-watt/2014/jan/15/georgeosborne-eu

Version 0 of 1.

George Osborne believes that he shares one great quality with Tony Blair. This is the ability to frame a highly complex argument in simple terms and then use it to beat your opponents into submission.

The chancellor showed that he is a match for the man he refers to as The Master on the first count in his speech to the Open Europe / Fresh Start conference in London. We will have to wait another four years to see if he has succeeded on the second front.

Osborne, who has spent an immense amount of time thinking and consulting on his speech on the EU, has framed his argument in two simple ways – one for an EU audience and one for a domestic audience.

<strong>EU audience – don't make the UK choose between euro membership and leaving the EU</strong>

Osborne said to Britain's EU partners: provide legal guarantees for Britain and other EU member states outside the eurozone or force us to choose between joining the euro or leaving the EU. Britain would obviously choose the latter. He said:

I believe it is in no one's interests for Britain to come to face a choice between joining the euro or leaving the EU. We don't want join the euro.

<strong>Domestic audience: fervent pro-Europeans and withdrawalists are both defeatists</strong>

A key lesson from Blair – the legacy of the Third Way – is to present your argument as the reasonable middle ground. So Osborne said that those who want to leave the EU regardless and fervent pro-Europeans (those who camaigned in favour of euro membership) are both wrong. He said they both underestimate Britain's ability to reform the EU. He said:

The one thing that unites those who urged Britain to join the euro and those who advocate leaving the EU is their shared conviction that any change is impossible and that there is no other way. There is another way. It is time to change the EU and to change Britain's relationship with it and then to place the decision in the hands of the British people.

Osborne will congratulate himself on the reception his speech received. But it will take another fours years to know whether he will meet the second Blair goal of actually winning the argument. His biographer Janan Ganesh argued this week in the FT this week that David Cameron is in danger of losing control of his party on Europe.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.