PM's strategy on UK's EU membership condemned to fail – Clegg

Nick Clegg has said that David Cameron's "peculiar" plans to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership ahead of a referendum by the end of 2017 are "condemned to failure".

In a speech to the Centre for European Reform on Wednesday, in which he declared that pro-Europeans were best placed to modernise the EU, the deputy prime minister said Cameron would only achieve a "little tweak here, a little tweak there". These would never satisfy hardline Eurosceptics, he added.

"What you can deliver from sweeping off a few crumbs from the European top table is never going to satisfy those whose actual agenda is not a little tweak here or a little tweak there. [It] is actually a fundamental either withdrawal from the EU or something very close to it. That is why I think it is a strategy which is condemned to failure.

"Germans and others say … we'd like to keep Britain in the EU, if we can do a little tweak here, a little tweak there we will help. A little tweak here, a little tweak there is not – as far as I can make out – not what large parts of the Conservative party want."

The deputy prime minister described the prime minister's view as "misguided and mistaken". He added: "Just imagine after the next election the Conservative party get a majority, so they have the democratic mandate to pursue their ambition of a repatriation and a wholesale renegotiation of Britain's status within the EU and then put that to a referendum in 2017.

"It would condemn the next government to years and years and years of mind-numbing travel and negotiation from one capital after the next to try and cobble together a package which will never satisfy Bill Cash or Liam Fox."

Clegg spoke out against Cameron's plans after Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, told the conference that the prime minister's strategy would fail because there would not be a major treaty change in time for his timetable. Grant said the Germans had told him they would like to underpin new eurozone governance arrangements among all 28 EU member states, but they had said that if Britain tabled "unreasonable demands" they would agree a treaty among a smaller number of countries.

Grant and Clegg were speaking at the launch of a CER report that calls for a series of reforms. Clegg said the prime minister should follow the approach he adopted in the EU budget reform negotiations by building alliances for reform.

He said: "We need to make the case for bold reform – reform which might even have been unimaginable a few years ago. But not unilaterally say we want to discard all the bits we don't like but only keep the bits we like and you lot have to accede to that, otherwise we will leave. Just saying that illustrates perhaps what a peculiar negotiating strategy that would be and how unlikely it would be to succeed."