Does the UK have a Future in Europe?

A conference by guest speaker Dr Julie SMITH, Director of the newly established European Centre in the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and Fellow in Politics at Robinson College, Cambridge.

 

David Cameron has pledged to hold a referendum on Britain’s ongoing membership the EU in 2017 if the Conservatives are back in government after the 2015 general election. Before that he hopes to secure a renegotiation of the UK’s terms of membership of the EU to make it more palatable to British voters – or at least to his own party members.  This all sounds rather familiar. In the1970s, the Labour party was divided on Europe, tried to renegotiate and then held a vote on staying in the then Common Market.  The vote was a resounding ‘yes’ in 1975.  So can Cameron replicate that vote or is he playing a dangerous game that will leave the UK outside of the Union?  This talk will outline the current attitudes of parties, voters and the media towards the EU and consider the prospects of renegotiation and referendum.

 

Dr Julie SMITH is Director of the newly established European Centre in the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and Fellow in Politics at Robinson College, Cambridge.  She was previously Head of the European Programme at Chatham House and currently leads the Cambridge team on the multi-national OPAL project on national parliaments and Europe post-Lisbon, funded by our national research councils, in Cambridge’s case the ESRC.

Julie Smith’s main research interests include: parliaments and the EU; European elections; the UK’s relations with the EU; and parliaments and budgetary politics.  She is co-authoring a book on parliaments and budgetary politics and planning a monograph on British political parties and the EU.

Her publications include: Editor and contributor to Special Issue of International Affairs on Forty Years On: the UK and Europe (November 2012); Towards a More Comprehensive, Strategic and Cost-effective EU Foreign Policy: The Role of National Parliaments and the European Parliament, with Ariella Huff and Geoffrey Edwards (2012), Reinvigorating European Elections: the Implications of Electing the European Commission (2005). She is co-editor of the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union (2014) and is editor of the Edward Elgar Series on New Horizons in European Politics.