SHAMELESS, SLIPPERY AND UTTERLY SELF-SERVING
What the blithering flip was he thinking? how did tony Blair imagine that it would help Ed Miliband if he were to pop up mid-election and remind us that Labour is too disdainful of ordinary voters to ask their opinion on EU membership?
It’s true that Blair was a successful campaigner in his time; but his reputation started to sink almost immediately after the 2005 election as the disastrous consequences of his Iraq policy became visible. Since he left office, we have mainly heard of him in the context of gazilliondollar fees from dodgy autocrats.
Does he truly think he can rouse Labour’s activists by jetting in and delivering a condescending lecture about how he understands our European interests better than we do? Plenty of Left-wingers will tell you the only kind of closer association with Europe they want from Blair is to see him on trial for war crimes at the hague.
the speech itself was what we have come to expect from the old freebiemeister: haughty, hackneyed and slippery. half our trade is with the EU, Blair claimed; actually, the EU now accounts for just 44 per cent of our exports, and that figure is falling almost by the hour.
he held up the experience of Norway and Switzerland as a warning of what happens when you lose your say over the shaping of EU legal acts; but he forgot to mention that public opinion in both those countries is now so solidly against accession that their pro-EU campaigners have given up.
he was even shameless enough to bring up China and India without mentioning that Switzerland, unlike the EU, has a free trade agreement with the former and is negotiating one with the latter.
In short, he did everything he could do to misrepresent the anti-EU case as insular and nostalgic when, in reality, it is based on a conviction that Britain is a global nation that would do better if it were not trapped in the world’s only shrinking customs union.
With an almost heroic lack of selfawareness, Blair argued that holding a referendum would mean instability and might drive businesses away from Britain.
ON ONE level, this is demonstrably untrue: our recovery took off almost exactly the moment that David Cameron announced an In/Out poll in January 2013; and, while I’m not arguing that the one was caused by the other, it plainly wasn’t prevented by it, either.
Never mind our current recovery, though. the truth is that we have heard all these predictions of doom before — not least from Blair himself.
Cast your mind back to the late Nineties. Remember how supporters of the euro used to try to scare us. If we kept the pound, they said, investors would leave, growth would slow, unemployment would rise. In fact, Britain has attracted more investment, grown faster and created more jobs than the eurozone states — more jobs, indeed, over the past four years, than all of them put together.
Yet the same people trot out the same flawed arguments about having a freetrade- only relationship with the EU. When I say ‘the same people’, I don’t just mean the same categories of people, such as CBI bureaucrats, mega-bankers and tUC officials. I mean precisely the same individuals — with Blair prominently at their head.
Imagine we had listened to them. Suppose we had put ourselves through the same disaster that Greece, Spain and Ireland went through — only far, far worse, because, unlike those countries, we had spent our reserves during the good years, and were running a budget deficit going into the crash. the resulting calamity would, apart from anything else, almost certainly have blown the single currency to smithereens. Yet, far from apologising, tony Blair continues to assure us that he knows best. he refuses to learn from having got it so badly wrong last time. he actively boasts of his contempt for public opinion.
as he put it towards the end of his premiership: ‘the British people are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don’t expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it.’
Got that? You may want something; but you secretly yearn for politicians who will ignore you. there is the authentic voice of the Euro-integrationist: smug, vain and wrong.
Opinion polls are very clear. Britain wants a referendum. Young or old, male or female, Euro-enthusiast or Eurosceptic, we feel that an issue of this magnitude should be decided by the entire nation.
Labour often asserts that businesses are unsettled by the prospect but, while one or two megacorporations don’t like it, businesses as a whole favour a referendum by 66 per cent. So, incidentally, do Labour voters, by 55 per cent.
these statistics are worth recalling because Ed Miliband, like Blair, is prone to claim that David Cameron has been ‘pushed’ into a referendum by ‘Ukip and the tory Right’. In fact, if anyone ‘pushed’ the PM, it was the British people.
In other words, the system worked: politicians responded to public opinion. there is no dishonour here: it’s what’s meant to happen in a democracy.
One has to ask, though, why Blair thought it wise to pick on an issue where he is so at odds with public opinion. Most of the other parties favour a referendum, whether they are anti-EU (Ukip), pro-EU (the Greens) or somewhere in between (the Conservatives).
Even the Lib Dems appear, however reluctantly, to have accepted the case in principle, and are concentrating on trying to load the question and enfranchise foreign voters to secure more votes to stay in.
Only the SNP shares Labour’s hostility — a stance so hilariously paradoxical, given that party’s attempt to break up Britain through a referendum in Scotland, that it almost defies description.
a possible reason for Blair’s choice of subject is that uncritical support for Brussels is one of the few areas of policy where he can sincerely support the current Labour leader.
MILIBaND has comprehensively disowned New Labour. Where Blairism was about allowing businesses to make profits, so as to generate more revenue for ministers to spend on their pet schemes, Miliband is openly anti-business.
On issue after issue — tax, immigration, contracting out in the NhS — he has repudiated his predecessor-but-one. hostility to a referendum is at least something the two men can still agree on.
Nonetheless, one has to ask whether tony Blair’s comments were primarily intended for the British electorate at all. these days, he struts a far wider stage.
Remember how, back in 2004, when he was a putative candidate for the newly created EU presidency, Blair handed away the greater part of Britain’s rebate and won nothing in return?
that gesture, in retrospect, was plainly aimed at a non- domestic audience, and I suspect yesterday’s speech was, too. Now he’s apparently lost his job as peace envoy for the Middle East, no doubt Blair is keen to remind the world that he is available for offers.
tony Blair has come to personify the trans-national elites, the Davos schmoozers, the know-it-alls who fret that the rest of us are too dim to understand politics. he is attracted to the EU system, not despite its lack of democracy, but precisely because it allows technocrats to sidestep public opinion.
Indeed, the real mystery is not Blair’s Euro-fanaticism, nor even Miliband’s, but the fact that both men still think of themselves as authentic heirs of the Labour tradition.
a party that was founded to enfranchise and empower working people now refuses to ask their opinion. that’s what Brussels does to you.