THE BRITISH PUBLIC gave Tony Blair his notice last week. But it looks like it will be the French who get to decide how much longer the Prime Minister actually stays in office. If they approve the new EU constitution on May 29, they will be pencilling in a provisional date for Mr Blair’s political obsequies.
A French “yes” vote will confirm Mr Blair’s date with destiny. Early next year, in our own referendum the British people will, one hopes, then reject the constitution and, in the process, eject Mr Blair from office.
If the French vote “no” in two weeks, they won’t exactly be awarding the Prime Minister a new lease on No 10, but they will presumably extend his shorthold for a while at least by releasing him from the obligation to hold the vote next year.
How ironic. A prime minister who has made it his principal foreign policy objective to place Britain at the heart of Europe now finds himself praying every night that enough sullen French voters, variously ticked off with Brussels, Anglo-Saxons, Turkey and the local gendarmes, can be found to come out and vote “no”.
My strong suspicion is that the Prime Minister’s prayers will be in vain. I say this not because of any inside knowledge of the reliability of French opinion polls but on the simple conviction that the French will simply not be allowed to vote “no”. The country of Jean Monnet, Jacques Delors and François Mitterrand is not going to let a motley alliance of left and rightwing nobodies derail it from its destiny. I accuse no one of impropriety, but let me put it this way: when the votes are in from Martinique Ouest and Nouvelle Calédonie Central, just as they did in the 1992 Maastricht referendum, I suspect the “yes” campaigners will have eked out a close but famous victory.
The debate that will then follow in Britain will be among the most important we have had in 50 years — but it is essential that it be an honest one.
It was noticeable that Mr Blair suffered in last week’s election because he was almost universally deemed (wrongly in my view) to have deceived the country about Iraq. It’s good that we in Britain have such an elevated sensitivity to the faintest whiff of mendacity from our leaders, because it should enable us to catch the stench of duplicity that is pouring out of them about the scope, aims and consequences of the EU constitution.
Take for a start the claim that it would be senseless to reject the document, because it changes nothing of consequence; it all represents just a clerical tidying up exercise. This week in Washington John Bruton, the congenial former Irish Prime Minister who is now the EU Ambassador to the US, insisted that the whole kerfuffle about this constitution was silly. It was merely a “consolidating” exercise that transferred existing laws and treaties into a handy, 286-page booklet.
This is the line the British Government maintained for a while. It is a puzzling claim, on a number of levels. First, it if it were true, it would represent a monumental failure for the EU. Cast your mind back to the origins of the “constitutional”, process five years ago. The whole idea was that the EU needed to reconnect with the European people: that a democratic deficit had arisen between those well-heeled leaders in Brussels and Strasbourg and the voters. The constitutional process and the document that would emerge from it would fill that deficit, end the disconnect, reinvigorate the EU.
Now we’re to understand that it was all just a kind of filing exercise. It’s nonsense of course; there are real and significant changes in the constitution — from new labour laws to new powers to the European Parliament to new institutions of European foreign policy.
But don’t take my word for it. Even as we are being told that the constitution changes nothing, people elsewhere are being told a very different story. The German European Affairs Minister has described it as the “birth certificate of the United States of Europe”; Jacques Chirac said last week that it marked the triumph of the French social market vision for the whole of Europe.
And ask yourself this. When the French have voted and we are treated to that familiar picture of delighted young Parisians driving up and down the Champs Elysées, do you think Europe’s political elite will simply acknowledge it as an insignificant endorsement of a minor clerical process? Or do you think it will be hailed across the continent as an historic moment in the development of Europe, a giant step towards a new political entity?
In the British campaign that will follow, the Government will seriously ask us to believe that the constitution is either a consolidation or, as suggested recently, that it actually represents a transfer of power back from Brussels to London.
In the end, I suspect the Government and their friends in Europe will fall back on trying to persuade the British public with dire warnings about what will happen if we vote “no”. There is no alternative. A “no” vote will mean Britain’s banishment into the darkness outside the EU.
“Après ‘non’, le deluge.” This is the biggest deception of all. It will not mean the end of British membership of the EU. Doubtless a core group led by France and Germany will press ahead with integration. But as Europe grows larger, the Franco-German vision becomes ever more unwieldy. Instead, we in Britain will have a chance to articulate an alternative. If the core group wants to go ahead with its nir vana — a Europe of open borders for terrorists and drug traffickers, a Europe held in thrall to deflationary monetary policy, a Europe that steadily ossifies all economic activity — let it.
Britain already has allies for a different vision of a looser, freer group, and these allies, in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, will be bolstered by the entry of countries such as Turkey and Ukraine, who are unlikely ever to join the Franco-German club as it stands.
It may not quite be Tony Blair’s preferred legacy. But we would all be the beneficiaries.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
