Britain’s push to win backing from its European partners for its wish list of EU reforms will go “right to the wire” at a summit this week, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said yesterday.
“There isn’t a deal yet, there is a working draft, there are lots of moving parts and we have got a negotiation that will run through this week, and I have no doubt will run right to the wire,” he told BBC television yesterday.
He said progress was needed to nail down key demands in the areas of competitiveness, the relationship between countries in the bloc that use the euro and those that do not, national sovereignty and access to welfare benefits.
British and EU negotiators have already broadly agreed much of a reform package, but tricky political issues, notably on migration, are still outstanding.
Prime Minister David Cameron is hoping to return from a summit of European leaders on Thursday and Friday in Brussels with a package of reforms that he can take to the British people in a referendum on whether to remain in the EU.
“Our European partners understand that we have to have a robust deal in each of those areas if the British people are to vote to remain inside the European Union,” Hammond told the Andrew Marr Show.
The campaign to remain in the bloc stepped up a gear yesterday, when the boss of airline easyJet said Britain’s membership of the EU was the reason that the cost of flights had plummeted, while the range of destinations had soared.
“Whatever way to look at it, the EU has brought huge benefits for UK travellers and businesses,” Carolyn McCall wrote in the Sunday Times.
“Staying in the EU will ensure that they, and all of us, continue to receive them.”
Campaigners to leave, however, repeated claims that EU supporters were running a fear campaign to scare people into voting to stay.
“Those that wish to remain in the EU should make the positive case for the supranational European project rather than frightening people,” former defence minister Liam Fox told the newspaper.
Meanwhile Eurosceptic Labour grandee Lord Blunkett has backed the campaign to keep Britain in the EU - warning of a “catastrophe” in the event of a vote to leave.
The former home secretary told Sky News Britain needed to be at the heart of Europe to deal with challenges such as Islamic State terrorism, organised crime and mass migration.
Lord Blunkett is one of five previously eurosceptic Labour Party figures who have backed the case for Britain to remain in a reformed European Union, in apparent support for David Cameron’s negotiations.
He said: “People who were sceptical 40 years ago may still be sceptical of the way Europe works as a bureaucracy and I’m certainly a Eurosceptic, but recognise the catastrophe that would happen if we pulled out of Europe now.
He added: “There are millions of people we’re going to have to win over, who are not enthusiastic, who have been sceptical... and are going to have to be won over if we don’t have an economic, a social and an international crisis, because our withdrawal from Europe would bring those things.”
Lord Blunkett along with Margaret Beckett, Neil Kinnock, Jack Straw and shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn - who all campaigned against membership of the European Community in 1975 - have signed an open letter to argue the case for remaining in the EU.