PM's dodgy tightrope

The Tory Prime Minister is treading a dodgy tightrope between his inclination to keep Britain in the EU and the preference of many of his backbenchers to walk away from it.

Cameron is happy to flirt with committing the Tory Party to a simple in-out referendum, but this would take place some time after the next general election.

The significance of this commitment owes nothing to the timeliness or substance of any possible negotiations with other EU states.

It is entirely to do with the discomfort many Tories feel at the progress of Ukip, which is making inroads into support for the Tory Party in its homelands, mainly on its demand for a referendum without delay on British membership of the EU.

The usual suspects are piling in against Cameron's plans, from the BBC and the liberal capitalist dailies to pro-Brussels dinosaurs Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine and the walking dead of the Liberal Democrats.

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Who can take Nick Clegg and Vince Cable seriously over the EU?

Like Tony Blair and his new Labour acolytes, they would have blundered into signing Britain up to the eurozone.

Whatever valid criticisms there are of Ed Balls, his role in counselling against this leap into the abyss is creditworthy.

Ed Miliband's obvious delight at seeing Cameron reprise the fox-in-the-headlights impersonation made famous by his predecessor John Major, as he was kicked from pillar to post by his own party, should not be expressed in terms which suggest support for the current EU centralisation course.

His criticism of Cameron's stance on a possible referendum some time in the future was couched totally in terms of how this would affect potential overseas direct investors.

This not only reflects new Labour's obsession with the need to attract transnational corporations, refusing even to consider the need to expand public ownership.

It also fails to take into account EU policy towards organised labour as though the question was irrelevant or that trade unions benefited from EU membership.

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Miliband has drawn attention to what he views as mistakes made by the last Labour government, among which he counts various aspects of its failure to control immigration from recent EU member states in eastern and central Europe.

He has criticised the permissive attitude to employment agencies that recruited only from new accession states for jobs in Britain and the failure to invest in greater professional skills.

But the Labour leader has remained silent on a succession of cases that were nodded through by the European Court of Justice in a massive blow to trade unionism and legally established workers' rights in individual nation states.

The Viking, Laval and Ruffert cases all concerned the right of employers to undermine agreements on pay and workplace entitlements by recruiting a workforce from a low-wage EU state and paying at that rate in high-wage countries such as Finland, Sweden, Germany and Luxembourg.

The unelected and unaccountable EU commission is intent on negotiating bilateral agreements with non-EU states to build on this assault on trade unionism.

Miliband should beware of being implicated, for the sake of apparent political self-interest, in the anti-union prejudices shared by Cameron's other critics.