For an allegedly Eurosceptic Conservative who says she is willing to contemplate the nuclear option of leaving the EU, Theresa May has proved surprisingly enthusiastic about integration in her own field of law and order.
Unlike some of her predecessors as home secretary, who have made known their reluctance to sit through 20-minute speeches by the Latvian interior minister, May has proved an exceptionally assiduous attender of the quarterly European justice and home affairs councils during her four years in office.
But unlike some of her more garrulous colleagues, she seems reluctant to talk about her activities in securing ever-deeper integration of criminal justice systems across Europe.
For example she has yet to explain her role at last month’s justice and home affairs council in Luxembourg in agreeing that there should be no EU replacement for Italy’s unsustainable search and rescue operation to save thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean.
Her reluctance to discuss her leading role on the European stage was evident again last Thursday when she met other interior ministers in Paris at a G6 meeting to discuss wider data sharing within Europe on internal flights to tackle the problem of jihadist fighters.
While her French and German counterparts were only too willing to discuss the meeting, it was left to her department’s permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, to disclose at an obscure Commons committee that Britain had warned Germany that it would not allow its planes to land in Britain unless it waters down its data protection laws to allow passenger lists to be handed over in advance.
While Britain has been keen to stress it is not part the Schengen common travel area that scrapped passport checks across most of the EU, it has been less vocal about its enthusiastic participation in the Schengen databases, which enable data on criminals and asylum seekers to be shared across Europe.
So it is something of a surprise to see May posing as a reluctant European in the Commons in order to win the support of her backbenchers to opt back into a package of 35 police and criminal justice measures, including the European arrest warrant.
The origins for this manoeuvre lay in David Cameron’s declaration in July last year that the UK wished to opt-out of 130 EU police and criminal justice measures under the banner “repatriating British powers from Brussels”. The move was widely portrayed as a series of measures to deal Ukip a propaganda blow.
The reason for the move dated to the Lisbon treaty negotiated in 2007 by Tony Blair, which under protocol 36 gave the UK the right to opt out of the police and criminal justice measures adopted under the Maastricht treaty in 1992.
So Britain had a right to opt out of all 130 measures agreed between Maastricht in 1992 and Lisbon in 2007, which Cameron proceeded to do with the caveat that the UK would immediately seek to opt back into them “where it is in the national interest to do so”.
The vote in the Commons on Monday will confirm the list of 35 measures that the UK intends to opt back into. As a Cambridge University study has shown, the 95 measures that Britain has chosen to stay out of will have little impact in the UK. Most are out of date and have been replaced by more recent measures introduced since 2007.
The threat of Tory revolt emerged when 100 Conservative MPs signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph demanding the mass opt-out and claiming it would deal a blow to the European arrest warrant, the European investigation order and the European public prosector.
But the public prosecutor does not yet exist and so is unaffected by this game of Euro hokey-cokey. Neither is the European investigation order, which came after the 2007 Lisbon treaty and the UK has already opted into.
This leaves only the European arrest warrant at stake. May can confidently count on the backing of Labour and the Liberal Democrats to ensure that Britain remains fully signed up to it. No wonder the rebellion petered out even before the debate got under way.
