As the EU continues to respond to the challenge posed by the French and Dutch referendum votes and its supposed budgetary crisis, Tony Blair is putting himself forward as the champion of EU reform. It’s bogus, of course. At best, he is only, as the EU Serf writes, “the EU’s Gorbachov, desperately trying to change the system he believes in so that it will not fail.” There’s an excellent editorial in the Business that gives the background.
The whole thing is well worth reading, but these are the key points:
“Of course, Mr Blair’s speech to the European Parliament last week was “passionate” – a favourite word in the New Labour lexicon now applicable after eight years in power to the Prime Minister’s views on all matters. Some European politicians who have not been exposed before to it were impressed by the beguiling Blairite rhetoric; those of us who have had our fill of it these past eight years saw it as the usual vacuous Blairite drivel dressed up in a European rather than a British context. Like his set-piece annual party conference speeches, which have become too absurd to parody, it was full of talk of modernisation and reform and completely absent of any concrete policies. Replete with cliches and banalities, his “vision” for the EU could mean almost anything anybody: after all, a clarion call to “embrace free markets and face up to the challenges of globalisation” is hardly long on prescription; it is also unconvincing, given the bizarre way it is being implemented on the home front, where taxes and spending rise relentlessly year after year, undermining Britain’s ability to compete in the global markets…”
[snip]
“Far more interesting was an interview Mr Blair gave to Le Monde, the publishing arm of the French Establishment, last Thursday. This is where he revealed his true colours, by admitting that he still supports the EU constitution (the one already rejected by the French and Dutch peoples) and even hinting that it could be resuscitated if only the EU embraced a few Blairite economic reforms. It is worth quoting what he had to say: “I continue to think that the Constitution is a set of rules perfectly apt for Europe to function better. We will have to reflect on it again. The problem is that the people have said to the politicians: we will not let you adopt this text until you begin to respond to our daily problems. They did not vote ‘no’ because of this or that article [in the constitution].”
“This is Mr Blair’s duplicity laid bare for all to see, a prefect example of the new Blairite dual posture: Euro-sceptic at home, Europhile abroad. For brash British audiences, it is a Thatcherite defence of the UK budget rebate; for sophisticated Europeans, it is a nod-and-a-wink that he knows how to resuscitate their beloved constitution. As soon as a couple of high-profile reforms are pushed through, Mr Blair is saying, and when the economic cyclical returns a modicum of growth to Europe, then the voters will nod through the constitution. His contempt for the normal protocols of democracy has rarely been so apparent. Those of us who have grown world-weary on Blairite pronouncements suspect that it is the prelude to the sort of “eye-catching” initiatives to soften up public opinion – they are usually meaningless and therefore quickly abandoned – that have been the hallmark of the New Labour years on the home front.
“Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Blair had this to say: “Some German politicians are claiming that I want a Europe that is only about free-trade. I want the very opposite. I support a political dimension to Europe”. Maybe the Euro-sceptic British press currently embracing Mr Blair as their champion does not read Le Monde. It should: the prime minister went on even to deny the traditional divisions between Euro-sceptic and Europhile, or proponents of a free-trade Europe versus a social Europe. Instead, he argued, the division is between those who support modernisation and those who reject it, a distinction which aptly summarises the utter vacuity of his views on Europe.”
[snip]
“The strange irony is that the more Blair-Brown talk of reforming Europe, the more this dysfunctional duumvirate re-shapes Britain in Europe’s image. British taxes have surged upwards towards European levels in recent years. Independent and reliable OECD figures, to which Blair-Brown never refer and of which the British media is wholly ignorant, show that UK public spending has surged from 37.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000 to an expected 45.2% next year. This is the fastest rise in public spending of any country in the world and has drastically closed the gap with the Euro-zone: in 2000 UK public spending as a share of GDP was 9.6% percentage points below the Euro-zone average; by next year the difference will be down to 2.2 percentage points.
“Thus do Blair-Brown mimic what they affect to despise. By adopting the social chapter, signing up to two integrationist European treaties and pushing through a huge number of large regulatory initiatives, Britain’s supposedly fabled labour market flexibility has been drastically eroded. The British model is dying the death of a thousand Brown-Blair cuts and looking more like the sclerotic economies of continental Europe every year. So Europe’s political establishment should relax: for Mr Blair to go to Europe and call for modernisation cannot possibly be construed as endorsing real free-market reform when the Blair-Brown government has spent its time doing the opposite at home…
Indeed (but then you knew I was going to say that).