Obama expected to back Britain staying in European Union

Share

U.S. President Barack Obama is set to plunge into Britain's referendum on the European Union during a three-day visit to London by encouraging the country to stick with the EU.

Mr. Obama arrived in London late Thursday and he will hold a news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday. During the briefing, the President is expected to back Mr. Cameron's call for Britain to stay in the EU.

"We believe that the U.K. has benefited from the single market that is good for the British economy and that, in turn, is good for the United States economy," a White House spokesman said last week in preparation for the President's visit. Mr. Obama's intervention has drawn sharp criticism from those campaigning for Britain to leave the EU.

"Mercifully, this American President, who is the most anti-British American President there has ever been, won't be in office for much longer and I hope will be replaced by somebody rather more sensible when it comes to trading relationships with this country," said Nigel Farage, Leader of the UK Independence Party, which is campaigning on the Vote Leave side.

"I just think it's paradoxical that the United States, which wouldn't dream of allowing the slightest infringement of its own sovereignty, should be lecturing other countries about the need to enmesh themselves ever deeper in a federal superstate," former London mayor Boris Johnson, now a Tory member of Parliament who is also campaigning for Vote Leave, told reporters this week.

The President's visit caps a frantic first week of campaigning in the referendum that will be held on June 23. While the debate over the EU has been under way in Britain for months, the official campaign period began last Friday. Since then, there has been a steady stream of high-profile interventions backing the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign.

In just six days, the U.K. Treasury office has issued a 200-page report that concluded Brexit would cost each household in Britain £4,300 ($7,800) by 2030, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has said leaving the EU could result in lower economic growth and higher inflation, and eight former U.S. Treasury secretaries have signed an opinion piece in the Times of London saying Brexit would diminish Britain's influence and threaten London's status as a global financial centre. This week, the government even turned a slight rise in unemployment figures into a call to vote against leaving the EU, claiming the 21,000 increase in the number of jobless between December and February was a sign of employers' fears about Brexit.

The efforts appear to be paying off as polls show support for the Britain Stronger campaign has been rising. A poll conducted for the Daily Mail and ITV News released Thursday showed 51 per cent of those surveyed would vote to remain inside the EU. That was up three percentage points from the same survey in March.

The Leave campaign has been forced to react at almost every turn, decrying the Treasury figures, labelling Mr. Carney a fearmonger and slamming the claims about the unemployment figures as cynical. The Leave side got something of a boost on Thursday when former Bank of England governor Mervyn King called the conclusions in the Treasury study "simple minded."

"One should be very cautious of precise, numerical estimates of what the consequences would be," Lord King told Bloomberg TV this week. "I think it's very important that people should not exaggerate the impact, either of staying in or of leaving."