UK official denies Cameron threatened to advance European Union vote

A British official on Sunday dismissed a report that Prime Minister David Cameron had threatened at an EU summit last week to bring forward a referendum on British membership of the EU if Jean-Claude Juncker became European Commission president.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Cameron had said he would not be able to ensure that Britain stayed in the European Union if Juncker got the job.


It said participants understood this to mean that a vote for Juncker could destabilize Cameron's government to the extent that the referendum would have to be brought forward from its planned date of 2017, and that this would make it likely that the British people would vote to leave the EU.

• Cameron must anyway go to the polls in less than a year. A British official, who declined to be named, said Cameron's plan to hold a referendum on membership in 2017 if re-elected had not changed, and that he did not favour bringing the vote forward.

But the official said Cameron had told his EU counterparts he did not think Juncker was the right person for the job, and made clear at a summit dinner in Brussels that choosing someone who was not a reformer could damage the EU's image in Britain and make it more likely that Britons would vote to leave.

A spokesman for Cameron's office said he would not comment on leaders' private discussions........[Reuters]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/UK-official-denies-Cameron-threatened-to-advance-European-Union-vote/articleshow/35926436.cms
2/6/14
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