Guardian News and Media/London
David Cameron is edging Britain towards the EU exit door after embarking on a negotiation strategy based on “threats, insults and disengagement”, Ed Miliband has said.
In rowdy Commons scenes, which saw one former Tory minister liken the incoming European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, to a Luftwaffe fighter plane, Miliband accused the prime minister of burning alliances, leaving his EU strategy in tatters.
The Labour leader said Cameron had showed how to alienate friends at the summit after he led an aggressive campaign to block the appointment of Juncker that was supported by just one other country - Hungary.
Miliband said: “His combination of threats, insults and disengagement turned out to be a masterclass in how to alienate your allies and lose the argument for Britain, including his threat to leave the EU if Juncker were chosen.”
He said that the prime minister’s failure to build alliances showed how Cameron’s wider EU strategy was failing.
The Labour leader said: “Now he wants to negotiate a new treaty when he can’t say what he wants in it - all the time driven by a party whose centre of gravity is drifting towards exit. Doesn’t he accept that with Juncker the strategy of threatening exit was put to the test and failed?
“This weekend has shown conclusively to everyone but this prime minister his renegotiation strategy is in tatters. We know where it would end. He will be caught in the gulf between his backbenchers who want to leave and what he can negotiate. The prime minister failed over Juncker, he was outwitted, out-manoeuvred and out-voted. Instead of building our alliances in Europe, he is burning them.”
The Commons Speaker, John Bercow was forced to intervene as Tory MPs interrupted Miliband. The speaker said: “The baying mob should calm itself” so the Labour leader could be heard. The prime minister said: “We have heard yet another performance worthy of (former Labour leader) Neil Kinnock. Endless words, endless wind, endless rhetoric, no questions, no grit and no ability to stand up for Britain.”
There was strong support for Cameron from the Tory benches, even from his critics. Stewart Jackson, a Eurosceptic Tory MP, said: “I always knew he had lead in his pencil. But it is good to see him sharpening it on the inexorable drive to ever closer union as personified by Juncker.”
Stephen O’Brien, a former Tory international development minister, likened Juncker to a Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 aircraft. O’Brien said: “In a previous Battle of Britain we saw off Junkers.”
