EU, EZ and UK

BBC Glossary on EU Qualified Majority Voting (QMV)
Council of the European Union - Unanimity Voting rights and Vetos
Voting Rights
The veto is a way of keeping national sovereignty over sensitive areas of decision-making.
The veto can be used when ministers from national governments vote in the Council of Ministers under the unanimity system.
Member states have steadily given up their powers of veto over time, broadening the areas subject to qualified majority voting in each successive treaty change.
In negotiations over the EU constitution in 2003/4, the UK insisted on keeping vetoes over tax, criminal justice, social security, treaty changes and EU funding.
"The measures, however, were overshadowed by the dispute with Mr Cameron, who demanded safeguards for UK-based financial services before he would agree to any EU treaty change. Mr Sarkozy said Mr Cameron’s demands were “unacceptable”. The UK premier’s veto also caused a breach with Ms Merkel, who had been fighting for new eurozone fiscal rules to be enshrined in an EU treaty agreed by all 27 members.
Mr Cameron’s insistence that he would go along with the treaty only if he won a series of technical concessions for the City of London – including allowing Britain to set higher capital ratios for London banks than the EU norm – was rejected out of hand."
It forced the eurozone’s 17 members, led by Germany and France, to opt instead for an intergovernmental deal that will have to be negotiated outside the EU legal framework
“breakthrough to a stability(& Growth) union” that would open the way for full fiscal union in the eurozone. At least six EU members outside the currency bloc will also participate in the agreement.

Britain’s summit price for backing treaty change was a financial services protocol packed with half-a-dozen complex, arcane regulatory fixes that left most European leaders “baffled”, according one official at the summit.

Contrary to widely believed French claims, the protocol was neither a demand for a general veto, nor a manifesto for light-touch regulation. Instead it covered more technical guarantees to address British gripes across 20 or more pieces of regulation in the Brussels pipeline.

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