Coordination of European policy inside the British government
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Martin Donnelly |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12580 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
HALDANE PRACTITIONER PERSPECTIVE
Coordination of European policy inside the British
government
1
Martin Donnelly
Academic Visitor, Hertford College, Oxford, UK
Correspondence
Martin Donnelly, Hertford College, Catte St, Oxford OX1 3BW, UK.
Email: mdglobalconsulting@gmail.com
This article looks at the structures of UK coordination of European policy from 1973 to 2016, from the perspective
of an insider for much of that period. I also draw some conclusions about the changing role, culture and cohesion of
Whitehall as it engaged with the European institutions. Personal perspectives are a useful, if inevitably limited, input
into understanding the UK’s relationship with Europe over this time—which itself has something wider to tell us
about the changing workings of British political decision-making. The story is one of a long retreat from classic high
Whitehall confidence to today’s more fragmented system—which ironically is more like the norm across European
governments struggling to manage EU issues coherently.
From the first accession discussions in the 1960s through all the succeeding decades of UK membership, the UK
civil service was widely seen across Europe as outstandingly effective. It combined the technical competence needed
to negotiate complex issues with a strong unifying ethos of policy coordination across Whitehall, agreed by ministers.
There was therefore always a single UK government position, whichever department was leading the negotiation
and however politically sensitive the issue. The politics of Brussels negotiation might lead others to present the UK
as an awkward partner. However, the UK civil service was respected and seen as a model of how to combine national
and European policy-making coherently.
My own public service career gave me a range of engagement with UK–EU decision-making. I joined the Trea-
sury in 1980 and first became involved in EU issues as the private secretary to the Financial Secretary to the Trea-
sury in 1982. The Financial Secretary was also the Minister for the EC Budget, a politically fraught issue at the time
of the so-called ‘we want our money back’row which raised the spectre of the UK withholding its European budget
contributions—which would, of course, have been illegal under Community and therefore UK law.
We attended all-night Budget Council meetings in Brussels and Luxembourg, were involved in acrimonious sup-
plementary and amending budget negotiations, met many groups of MEPs; and had to face a critical media and report
back to an unhappy UK Parliament after the meetings had produced outcomes which the UK did not much like. So it
was all good training for the future.
The unusual part of budget negotiations was that everything was decided by qualified majority vote. There was
no Luxembourg Compromise unanimity card to play on money matters, so we had to build blocking minority alli-
ances, and accept that they were never totally reliable.
1
This text represents a revised version of a lecture given on 16 November 2018 at the London School of Econo mics and Political
Science.
Received: 7 December 2018 Accepted: 7 December 2018
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12580
226 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm Public Administration. 2019;97:226–230.
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