Message is likely to win over content

Date: 11/06/1998

It is being billed as the 'People's Summit', but little of substance is likely to be agreed at next week's Cardiff finale to the UK presidency. Tim Jones reports

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair has two overriding objectives for next week's Cardiff summit.

Number two is to eradicate the reputation for ill-preparation which he earned among his peers at the Brussels euro-summit last month. Number one, as always, is to stay 'on-message' and on television.

Preparing his fellow heads of state and government for the shock of the euro, smoothing ruffled Turkish feathers, settling the quarter-century-old Cyprus dispute or overhauling the Union in readiness for three big new members will all come a joint and distant second on the Blair agenda.

This approach has informed the Blair presidency ever since it opened with the ceremonial arrival of a 12-star-bedecked Eurostar train at London's Waterloo station in January.

Under the surface, the presidency has been as successful as any of its predecessors. Real EU business has been conducted in Brussels by the UK's civil servants while, back in London, the 'story' of job creation and crime fighting has been told by the government's all-powerful propagandists: Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Charlie Whelan.

Whatever actually happens in the Welsh capital on 15-16 June, Blair's spin doctors will sell it, in the words of his Foreign Minister Robin Cook, as a 'People's Summit'.

Here, British common sense will bring continentals to their senses and address 'real' issues: crime, the environment, EU enlargement and job creation in the 'modern global economy'.

“We agree very strongly on the main elements of the economic reform agenda which I think will be the dominant agenda for Cardiff,” said Blair after a pre-summit meeting with Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar last week.

“If monetary union is to work to the best advantage of the people in Europe, it's important that it's accompanied by economic reform which focuses on issues of affordability and how we can make sure that Europe is properly competitive for the new world pressures which will be upon us.”

The discussion will provide an excuse for London to revive its proposal, launched by Finance Minister Gordon Brown at the 'informal' gathering of treasury chiefs in York two months ago, for special market-opening action plans.

These would extend the action plan programme for jobs into Europe's product and services markets, and try to discern why the prices of standard consumer products such as compact discs vary markedly across the Union.

Governments would be obliged to explain regularly to their counterparts the measures they had taken to remove minimum prices for consumer goods or to scrap cross-border barriers to buying electricity, gas or telecommunications services and trading stocks and bonds.

Since the rules governing all these markets already fall within the remit of the Union and its competition police officer, the European Commission, most member states' economic policy officials believe Brown's proposal to be at best an irrelevance and at worst a waste of their valuable time.

Nevertheless, prime ministers and the Brussels summit bad boy, French President Jacques Chirac, will spend next Monday morning sitting around a controversial 70,000-ecu American oak bespoke table and performing their by-now customary jobs rain dance.

Using the platform of the action plan and adoption of the annual 'broad economic guidelines', Blair and Brown will sell their post-Thatcherite vision of generating jobs with flexible labour markets, easy access to venture capital, better education and training and cutting red tape.

Denmark's Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and the Netherlands' Wim Kok will chime in with their formulae for getting unemployment down to UK levels while sticking to inflexible national bargaining over wages and working conditions, high tax rates and generous welfare provision.

Having swapped employment recipes, peckish leaders will head off to lunch, where Cook has promised them “specific space” for a debate on “the type of Europe we want in the next century”.

This should provide an opportunity for Chirac and the EU's wounded elephant, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to present their new plan for greater subsidiarity in the Union.

This joint initiative, hastily conceived at last month's Franco-German summit in Avignon in an attempt to bring some harmony back into the marriage after the Brussels bust-up, aims to put some flesh on the bones of the principle that the EU should only act in areas which cannot be left to national governments.

This is almost certain to be as vacuous as the Blair jobs plan, unless it attacks the Commission and Council of Ministers for usurping national powers (a new German refrain since the ban on tobacco advertising was agreed by health ministers in December) and comes up with concrete proposals for repatriation of certain policy areas.

The lunch-time philosophising is meant to prepare the ground for the summit's only genuine discussion, on how the negotiations with the six enlargement front runners are going and how the Union's institutions and budget should be overhauled to prepare for expansion.

“I do not think that many people throughout our own countries have yet grasped the immense historic step which enlargement represents for Europe,” Cook told the European Parliament a fortnight ago.

The Commission's Agenda 2000 package, which recommends significant reform of the EU's generous subsidy regimes for agriculture and run-down regions and setting aside 45 billion ecu for the eastern applicants, will be the centrepiece of the debate.

Blair and his team are certain to tell the waiting press afterwards that the New Labour government used this debate to issue a 'clarion call' for an end to wasteful farm subsidies and tight control of the Euro purse-strings.

The reality will be more prosaic, but it will nevertheless be a debate of real significance. It will be the first at this level since the full Agenda 2000 proposals were published in March and should provide a pointer as to whether a reform package can be agreed by next summer.

Summiteers will be able to judge just how seriously to take the demands of Kohl and Kok that, in the words of Blair's political predecessor Margaret Thatcher, they should get their “money back”.

Both are using the Agenda 2000 debate to revive calls for reductions in their net contributions to the EU budget, but nobody yet knows whether Kohl, in particular, means business.

If the premiers are going to argue, this - together with the issue of how to treat Turkey - will give them their opportunity. Aznar and his officials have already vented their anger over the calls for budget rebates and cohesion fund cuts, and can be expected to do so again if provoked.

If so, fickle political friendships can be rebuilt over dinner and fireworks with Queen Elizabeth II at Cardiff Castle.

The next morning, EU leaders will chew over the battles against drug abuse and organised cross-border crime, as well as implementation of the Kyoto agreement to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Lunch-time and early afternoon will provide a heaven-sent opportunity for photographs with South African President Nelson Mandela, the world's only surviving saintly statesman, on his farewell tour.

Blair is unlikely to repeat his mortifying Brussels experience. Nothing on the Cardiff agenda could possibly turn into a bad-tempered talkathon.

Barring hijacking by international events, Campbell and company should be able to sell the 'Blair triumphs in Cardiff' story.