Brown seeks to look beyond EU treaty

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

Mr Brown signing the EU treaty: now move on, he says.

The British government has begun a concerted effort to look beyond the new EU treaty in an effort to undermine Conservative opposition arguments for a referendum.

The effort was spearheaded by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself at a conference of business leaders in London on Monday.

Mr Brown said: "The institutional debate inside Europe is now settled for the foreseeable future.

"So with the completion of the Lisbon treaty... we now have an opportunity to move on to address the challenges that matter most to Europe's citizens - in particular, how we can sustain stability, growth, competitiveness and jobs."

The government's objective, ahead of the parliamentary debate and decision on the Lisbon treaty, is to get business on its side and try to sideline the call for a referendum as a distraction.

What counts

Talking to and listening to business leaders at the conference, I was struck, as always at these kinds of meetings, how they regard themselves as the true champions, pioneers sometimes, of the European Union.

For them, the institutional arguments are rather far away. What count are the rules and regulations under which they operate. You talk, we do, is their argument to politicians.

Certainly at this meeting, attended by the heads of major companies such as BT, Rio Tinto and Centrica, the EU treaty seemed very remote. There were hardly any references to it.

Instead there was much talk of the need for economic liberalisation and globalisation, and for EU leadership, in which Britain should play its part.

The former head of BP Lord Browne said the EU should "lead the way in forging a new international climate change agreement".

Rio Tinto's chairman Paul Skinner said Europe had been "undersold".

He, like others, urged greater reform. "There is an urgent need for us to lift our game," he said.

The institutional debate inside Europe is now settled for the foreseeable future. Gordon Brown

There were several references to the failure of the EU to match the United States in terms of innovation and to the need to watch out for India and China.

"The EU has failed to rise to the hi-tech challenge," stated Sir Ronald Cohen, chairman of Bridge Ventures.

He warned that, without reform, the EU "will not catch up with the United States or keep up with India and China".

A common energy policy?

One potentially significant suggestion for the future came from Sir Stephen Wall. Once a senior civil servant dealing with European policy, he is now vice-chairman of Business for a New Europe.

He asked Mr Brown whether the European Commission should act on behalf the whole EU on energy policy, as it does for trade.

Mr Brown side-stepped the question but the Foreign Secretary David Miliband did refer approvingly to an EU foreign minsters' meeting in September at which there was, he said, general agreement that the EU had failed to stand up to Russia over energy and should do so in the future.

Business Secretary John Hutton also pointed out that energy policy would, under Lisbon, be subject to qualified majority voting.

"We won't have to move at the pace of the slowest," he said.

So a common energy policy is an idea whose time might come.

Sometimes, listening to these comments, one wondered whether actions had not quite followed grand words.

For example, when the chairman of BT Sir Michael Rake called for an European "single market to work as a home market", I pondered why telecom companies have never got round to eliminating international phone calls in the EU.

After all, there are none between the US and Canada.

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