ALMOST two and a half years ago Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, sought to pacify Tory Eurosceptics and keep the insurgent UK Independence Party at bay by promising an in-out referendum by the end of 2017 on membership of the European Union. It worked. The election on May 7th barely featured Britain’s vexed relations with the EU. UKIP won a single seat; Mr Cameron an astonishing (if small) majority. Now the bill falls due.
The referendum is winnable. Over the next year or so Mr Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, can probably extract enough from their partners to persuade Britons to vote to stay in. Yet that victory must be just a first step. The real agenda—the one that matters to Britain’s prosperity and to the EU as a whole—will take longer to bear fruit. It will also demand a more sustained effort than Mr Cameron has so far shown.
As the economy and Scottish secession threatened to wreck Mr Cameron’s first term, so Europe looms over his second. No issue riles his party like the EU, on which opinions range from sceptical to head-bangingly furious. If Britain votes to leave the union, it will also end up outside the...
from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1IAigYO
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