http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/25/eu_opt_ins_explained/
John Lettice
"While in the background the EU's interior ministers hatched plans to fingerprint all 450 million of us, the foregrounded story in the UK was our opt-out/opt-in/veto. Shadow Home Secretary David Davis claimed that actual Home Secretary (arguably the shadowier one) David Blunkett was selling the UK down the river by accepting qualified majority voting and losing the veto, while Blunkett insisted that we were getting the best of both worlds.
Blunkett's claim appears to be based, more or less, on the view that majority voting will make it a lot easier to bring in new security wheezes without having to bother too much about objections from lily-livered Scandinavians, but that by retaining the ability to just say no, the UK doesn't have to get involved in 'federalist' stuff like EU border police and an EU consular service and common visa. As Blunkett himself put it so clearly on Radio 4's Today this morning, 'we don't have an opt-in, we have an opt-out.'"
