All sceptics now?
- 2 Feb 06, 05:12 PM
Well, well. Are we all Euro-sceptics now? Read an intriguing speech on Europe by the prime minister and you do wonder. In it, he insists that not all Euro-sceptics are anti-European. There is, he says, a strain of Euro-scepticism which he calls "practical scepticism" which is "a genuine, intellectual and political concern about Europe as practised".
"This is not xenophobia, nor devotion to undiluted national sovereignty," he goes on, "but a worry about Europe's economy being uncompetitive; its institutions too remote; its decision-making too influenced by the lowest common denominator."
A description, you might think of Gordon Brown's European views and, perhaps, latterly his own too.
What though of his desire to get Britain into the single currency and signed up to the Euro constitution? On the euro currency he says "the economics had to be got right and the politics follow".
My recollection of his original position was that it was the other way about - the politics, he used to argue, had been settled. All we had to wait for is the economics to be right. He once argued that the public should vote for the constitution but now says "no-one in Europe knew what it was meant to solve".
Some are already calling this a valedictory speech from Tony Blair designed to counter the claim that he failed in his mission to put Britain at the heart of Europe. It may be about something else - closing the gap between Blair-ite euro-enthusiasm and Brown-ite scepticism.
Why? Because this will ensure that, in New Labour's favourite phrase, there is a "clear dividing line" between them and David Cameron. One way of proving that Cameron is not the man of the future is to split him off from the next generation of EU leaders. It's not by chance then that Tony Blair praises both the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the man most likely (for now at least) to be the next French President - Nicolas Sarkosy.
Both are Conservatives. Both have criticised David Cameron's plan to take his party out of the group they sit in the European Parliament. Both, Tony Blair is saying, agree with me.
