Blair: We can change minds on leaving EU
TONY Blair was ridiculed yesterday after claiming Britons could change their minds over Brexit if the EU made certain alterations.
The former prime minister said “reform in Europe is key” to reversing the result of the referendum.
The avid Remainer also claimed Theresa May’s preferred Brexit deal with Brussels was impossible to achieve.
Mr Blair is the second ex-PM in as many days to make an intervention in the Brexit talks.
After Tory Sir John Major urged Parliament to block Brexit on Wednesday, his Labour successor Mr Blair claimed EU leaders could do the job by urgently addressing British concerns, particularly on immigration.
Averted
In a speech to the European Policy Centre think-tank in Brussels yesterday, Mr Blair said: “The British people should be given a final say on whatever deal is negotiated. If they are allowed that say, then Brexit can be averted.
“I and many others will work passionately for that outcome. Reform in Europe is key to getting Britain to change its mind.
“European leaders share the responsibility to lead us out of the Brexit cul-de-sac and find a path to preserve European unity intact.”
Tory MP Nigel Huddleston said: “As Tony Blair lectures today’s politicians on what we should be doing on Brexit, one wonders if he has the selfawareness to realise one of the key reasons we are leaving the EU is because of his inability to control immigration when he was PM for a decade.”
Brexit-supporting Labour MP Kate Hoey said: “His message of doom and gloom was ignored during the referendum and it will be discarded just as emphatically today.”
WHEN I turned on the radio yesterday morning I thought someone must have put in the wrong tape and accidentally broadcast an edition of the Today programme from the mid-1990s. I thought we had seen the last of Tony Blair and John Major dominating the news but apparently not. They have popped up again, just as they did more than 20 years ago, talking about Europe.
The only difference this time is that they are both in agreement: they want to stop Brexit. Blair, who was once dismissed by Major as “Monsieur Oui, the Poodle of Brussels”, was even imploring us all to read his erstwhile opponent’s Brexit speech as “heartfelt and analytical”.
Sorry but I did as Blair suggested and found the speech neither of those things – just the usual petulant, ill-argued case we have come to expect of one of our worst post-war prime ministers. His central case seemed to be that the Brexit vote was not a valid reflection of the will of the people because only 37 per cent of those who were registered to vote in the referendum voted Leave, while 63 per cent either voted Remain or did not vote at all.
Trying to claim all non-voters as being on one side of the argument – yours – is pathetic. Funny enough I don’t recall Major making the same argument after the 1992 general election when only 32.7 per cent of the registered electorate backed him and his party. Far from it, he insisted on staying in Downing Street until long after it became clear he had lost even the support of those who had voted for him.
IT IS not the act of a wise elder statesman to make such a high-profile speech – and what looks like a co-ordinated effort with Blair – trying to undermine Brexit talks. It is the action of a frustrated hasbeen. Major has himself become one of his party’s “bastards”, as he memorably described backbench MPs who voted against the Maastricht Treaty.
Major – as his poodle comment about Blair reminds us – once posed as a Eurosceptic, criticising the EU for its blundering bureaucracy. Surely then he would have had something to say about the incessantly negative and obstructive way in which the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has gone about his task? For months last year Barnier and his team promised talks on a trade deal would begin as soon as we had agreed a financial settlement. But when this was agreed they started pettifogging about the Irish border instead.
But no, Major didn’t say a word about this. Like so many Remainers he cannot see anything wrong in the EU’s attitude, which is instantly to strike down any proposal made by us and to ignore the growing impatience of businesses across Europe for a trade deal to be struck with Britain.
As for Major’s suggestion that Parliament should have a free vote on the Brexit deal or that we have a second referendum, it defies belief from a man who whipped the Maastricht Bill through Parliament and refused the public a say on it. Had the British people rejected Maastricht in 1993 – as I am sure they would have done given the chance – we would not be in the situation we are in today. The EU would have been forced to trim its megalomaniac ambitions and we might now be far happier members. As for Blair’s latest contribution to the Brexit debate, it is arguably even more absurd than Major’s. He said yesterday that it is “sickening that people should be prepared to sacrifice the peace in Northern Ireland on the altar of Brexit”.
No one is trying to sacrifice the peace and it is offensive of Blair to make this suggestion. But the EU is certainly stirring things unnecessarily by making a mountain out of a molehill over the Irish border.
It is demonstrably untrue that there needs to be a hard border between an EU country and a non-EU country outside the customs union. Switzerland is outside the customs union, has its own trade deals with outside countries and yet still manages to be part of the Schengen area without hard borders with its neighbours. Exports and imports can be declared electronically. The Foreign Secretary was ridiculed for his comment about travel between London boroughs the other day but I have driven from France into Switzerland and it is just as easy as driving from Camden to Islington.
In any case, if the EU would do as it promised and negotiate a free trade deal, most or all goods should be able to cross the Irish border without tariffs – and therefore with no need for any kind of customs formality.
BUT Blair has no interest in making this point. He wants to do whatever he can to frustrate the referendum result on Brexit. His claims that neither he nor Major “want to make life difficult” for the Prime Minister are laughable.
As for his claim that Brexit has reduced Britain’s standing in the world, one might hope by now he would have a little more insight into what he did by joining George W Bush’s military adventure in Iraq without a UN resolution or support from an international coalition.
Brexit has led to countries from South Korea to Australia announcing they are looking forward to doing business with Britain – very different from the damage to our international reputation from the Iraq War.
Ex-prime ministers are entitled to their opinions just like the rest of us but I have heard enough from the sad 1990s tribute act that is Blair and Major. They remind me of how we allowed the EU to grow arrogant and out of control in the first place.
‘Reminder of how EU became out of control’