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U.S. says Britain should stay in the EU
LONDON |
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States wants Britain to stay in the European Union and fears that a possible referendum on its membership of the 27-nation bloc would be divisive and make Britain inward-looking, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday.
The comments come as British Prime Minister David Cameron prepares to deliver a long-awaited speech on Britain's ties with Europe and mounting calls for a referendum on whether to leave the European Union after 40 years.
"We have a growing relationship with the EU as an institution, which has an increasing voice in the world, and we want to see a strong British voice in that EU," Philip Gordon, U.S. assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, told reporters at a briefing in London, according to two journalists present at the meeting.
Cameron says he wants to renegotiate ties with Europe and to then seek the public's "fresh consent" for a new settlement. In the coming weeks, he is widely expected to offer a referendum on Europe that could be held after the next election in 2015.
Cameron says he does not want to leave Europe, its biggest trading partner, but "euroscepticism" has increased among Conservative lawmakers and the public in recent years, with the anti-Europe UK Independence Party making gains in local polls in 2012.
Urging Britain and the EU to focus on big issues such as economic growth and jobs, Gordon said that "referendums have often turned countries inward".
"It is best for everyone, we think, when leaders have the time to be able to millfocus on common challenges rather than spending their time on internal workings.
"Every hour at a summit spent debating the institutional make-up of the European Union is one hour less spent on how to deal with the common issues of jobs, growth and international peace around the world."
(Reporting by Mohammed Abbas and Peter Griffiths; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Angus MacSwan)
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Washington’s concern regarding Britain’s continued membership of the EU has little to do with economics. It has everything to do with US foreign policy and global politics, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East.
Furthermore, the concern of the White House is not articulated in the interests of three hundred million Americans but in the interests of an unelected lobby group, that includes AIPAC which claims just 100,000 members, that represents American Jewish and Christian Zionists. This lobby is openly acknowledged to control the composition of congress through its enormous payments to every US election campaign in order to ensure the non-election of any nominated member of congress who does not acquiesce to its demands to support its political agenda, and to secure the election of those who pledge to do so.
The actual concern of the American electorate is the US economy, jobs, employment, health and human and civil rights. Whilst the concern of the AIPAC lobby group is to control US foreign policy through the amount of massive military and civil ‘aid’ that it gives each year, not only to Israel, but to many other states and regimes in order to implement and cement its foreign policy. That foreign policy is one that is primarily in the economic and political interests of its client state in the Middle East.
If Britain should sever its ties either partially or wholly with the EU, then the US congress will lose all its influence in Europe in order to control global politics through a compliant British government acting as its proxy.
The European Union is the largest trading block in the world, with a population of 500 million compared to just 300 million in the United States. That is why Philip Gordon, of the US State Department, is so concerned.
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