PARIS: George Osborne has won Nordic backing for Britain’s drive to reform its relationship with the EU, with his Finnish counterpart saying the UK’s demands were constructive and deliverable.
Alex Stubb, Finland’s finance minister, said Britain was justified in demanding economic reforms, restrictions on welfare benefits for migrant workers and a bigger role for national parliaments in EU decision-making.
It’s a very constructive approach, results-orientated, problem-solving. It’s a path that will ensure UK membership for the foreseeable future,” Mr Stubb told the Financial Times.
But Mr Osborne’s warm reception on a three-capital tour of Finland, Sweden and Denmark on Monday could raise concerns among some Conservative MPs that the government has set its negotiating bar too low.
There were reports last week that Andrew Lansley, the former health minister, had told a business audience that David Cameron would “choreograph” a row with France to try to convince voters he had struck a hard bargain.
Although the three Nordic countries are strong allies of the UK in seeking economic reforms, Mr Stubb is a well-connected former EU official who has criticised British attitudes to Europe in the past.
Mr Stubb, once an adviser to the former European Commission president Romano Prodi, said after meeting Mr Osborne in Helsinki: “I believe without the UK there is no EU.”
He said Europe would have to find ways of ensuring eurozone countries did not try to distort the EU’s single market to their advantage and to the detriment of non-euro countries such as Britain.
“The UK economy is one of the biggest in the EU,” he said. “Some kind of solution will have to be found.”
Mr Stubb said the bloc also needed to address Britain’s concerns about immigration, noting the UK was one of the few EU countries that had opened its borders to former communist “accession” states, such as Poland, in 2004.
“This has had consequences for the NHS, education and social security systems,” he said.
Other EU leaders have warned against changing treaties to accommodate Britain’s wish to restrict benefits for migrant workers, but Mr Stubb said such changes could be delivered with less upheaval “through a directive or legislation”.
