The end of the Blair decade

In his ten years as prime minister, Tony Blair has failed to keep many promises, but he still believes that he has brought the UK closer to the heart of the EU.

"Disappointing - but still the best you can get from Britain."

This is the way an EU government leader describes Tony Blair’s premiership, which is drawing to a close.

Ten years ago next week (1 May), Blair won a general election. He was five days short of his 44th birthday and he promised a generational change in politics, not least in attitudes to Europe. A self-proclaimed "passionate European", he pledged to put the UK at the heart of the EU. A decade later, the UK still has not adopted the euro, has not joined the Schengen area of border-free travel and has not given up its right to opt out on justice and home affairs matters.

But as Blair bows out, European politicians fear that his successors will be even more difficult to deal with.

In a farewell interview with European newspapers last week, Blair insisted that he had brought the UK closer to the heart of the EU.

"The days of isolation are over. When was the last time when we went into a European summit with everyone saying Britain is on its own?" he said.

"When I came to power in 1997 we still had the beef war, Britain was completely isolated in Europe…since then, we have been a major player in all the debates," he added.

But he conceded that this was not just because the UK had changed its position on European issues but also because the EU had changed. Enlargement brought in states which are closer to Britain’s views on Europe than to those of France or Germany.

"I think there is a changing mood in Europe which is partly about enlarged members but it is also partly that Europe itself wants to focus on practical policy, the economy, energy, the environment, crime, immigration."

Since 2004, the EU has embraced an agenda championed by the UK which focuses on economic competitiveness, combating climate change and fighting terrorism. The informal Hampton Court summit of October 2005, organised by Blair as chair-in-office of the EU, set out the Union’s agenda for the years to come, focusing on energy, migration, education and research and development.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, has incurred the wrath of French President Jacques Chirac in the first years of his mandate because of his close relationship with Blair. The British prime minister, who sang Barroso’s praises four times during the interview, has been his main mentor and ally at the top EU table since he swapped the Portuguese premiership for the Commission presidency. Now, as Blair departs the stage, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is Barroso’s new muse.

But Blair’s biggest political failure on Europe is that despite the EU moving closer to a British agenda, he has not succeeded in making his compatriots more pro-European.

He admitted that the British public is as Eurosceptic now as it was when he took office but he claimed that a subtle change of mood had taken place in the UK in the meantime. "I actually think it isn’t the same, that people do understand the importance of Britain being in Europe to a greater degree today."

Blair admitted that his counterparts from continental Europe were disappointed that Britain had not adopted the euro, despite him pledging to bring the UK in the eurozone. But he claimed that the reasons were "economic, rather than political".

Analysts believe he missed a window of opportunity to sign up to the single currency at the end of the 1990s. Instead of taking advantage of the short honeymoon with the public which followed his first election, in 1997, he buried the euro to capture Eurosceptic voters and gave in to pressure from Gordon Brown, his own finance minister, who opposed and still opposes the single currency.

Blair’s obsession with justifying his actions to a UK domestic audience was all-consuming and over time it has alienated many of those who were his allies. If it were not for the new member states, he would look short of friends at EU summits.

Looking back over his decade in power, Blair is adamant that he did everything he could for Europe with such a sceptical public.

"Public opinion is public opinion, as you know, and in Britain it is influenced usually by the media," he said.

Although he cites public opinion as the reason for his failure to do more on Europe, in one specific instance Blair did confront the sceptical British public. In defiance of public opinion, he engaged Britain in the Iraq war - and its failure came back to haunt him.

He claimed he did not regret having promised a referendum on the EU constitution, which he did under pressure from Eurosceptic media, although he admitted that his own perception was that a referendum was not needed, since the constitution did not alter the relationship between member states and the EU.

"I made exactly these arguments myself two or three years ago, but in the end I am afraid you have got to accept people believed what they were getting was something fundamentally different from a normal conventional treaty and, you know, one of the things in politics is you have to got to listen to public opinion.

"There wasn’t really an alternative."

Blair’s declaration that he would hold a referendum on the constitution put Chirac under pressure to organise a popular vote in France. The negative French vote of May 2005, followed within days by a resounding ‘No’ in the Netherlands, spelled the death of the constitution in its current form.

Now Blair wants to make a farewell present to his EU colleagues in the shape of a deal on the constitution, to be clinched at the 21-22 June summit. He would leave Downing Street only days later.

The plan is to get an agreement in June on the content and the timetable for the adoption of a new, slimmed-down version of the constitution, which Blair called a "conventional amending treaty, a simplified treaty, that gives you the rules that make Europe more effective".

The new treaty, very similar to French presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy’s ‘mini-treaty’, would not be submitted to a referendum in the UK.

"If it is not a constitutional treaty so that it alters the basic relationship between Europe and the member states, then there isn’t the same case for a referendum. We didn’t have one on Amsterdam, for example," Blair said, recalling the outcome of his first European summit, which came within weeks of his move into Downing Street.

Merkel, who is currently president in office of the EU, has welcomed his decision.

But the opposition Tories and the Eurosceptic media have strongly attacked Blair’s plan, accusing him of re-introducing the constitution through the back door.

The plan is for Blair to take the blame for helping rescue the constitution, which has long been fiercely opposed by the influential Eurosceptic media. This would allow Brown, his anointed successor, who is no great supporter of the constitution, to start his premiership unsullied by an unpopular decision.

Although Blair’s EU legacy has been tarnished by his reluctance to confront the UK’s prevailing Euroscepticism, he did inspire a generation of leaders not only in the new member states but also in ‘old’ EU.

The French Socialist presidential hopeful Ségolène Royal has unashamedly boasted to the French public that she was looking to Blair’s New Labour programme for inspiration.

His dogged fight to keep the British budget rebate and give it up only in exchange for drastic cuts in farm subsidies has provided the first chance in decades to reform the EU budget. Although he had been outmanoeuvred by Chirac and former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder on farm reform in 2002, it was Blair’s stubborn insistence that obliged EU leaders to agree, in 2005, to launch a comprehensive review of the EU budget in 2008.

Blair’s tenacious support for enlargement helped keep EU’s doors open and launch accession negotiations with Turkey, in 2005, in the face of a sceptical France and Germany.

But he slipped back into populism last year when he decided not to allow Bulgarians and Romanians to take up jobs in the UK, after their countries joined the EU, despite evidence that opening the door to citizens from the new states had been good for the British economy.

Blair’s future, after he leaves Downing Street at the age of 54, is anyone’s guess.

He laughed when asked whether he would accept a top job in the EU institutions. Since he vetoed France and Germany’s candidate for the presidency of the Commission in 2004 and was instrumental in Barroso’s appointment, Blair knows that he has little chance of landing a job in Brussels anyway.

• The full text of the interview with Tony Blair can be found at http://www.europeanvoice.com/current/article.asp?id=27890

In his ten years as prime minister, Tony Blair has failed to keep many promises, but he still believes that he has brought the UK closer to the heart of the EU.