Tony Blair’s “parting gift” to his successor is a “stick of European dynamite”, said Fraser Nelson in The Business. This week’s EU summit in Brussels aimed to settle, in broad outline, the main points of the constitutional treaty voted down by France and Holland two years ago: what it amounts to is “an attempt to sneak through the main parts of the constitution without holding a referendum”.
Earlier this week Blair told MPs that the new agreement would be an “amending treaty”, not a constitution, making a referendum unnecessary, said Gabriel Milland in the Daily Express. To ensure this, he set out four “red lines”, said The Guardian. Britain would not accept a treaty that allows the Charter of Fundamental Rights to change UK law; displaces the role of British foreign policy; requires the UK to give up control of its common law and judicial and police system; or introduces majority voting on tax and benefits issues. He told the House of Commons: “If we achieve those four objectives, I defy people to say what it is that is… so fundamental it would require a referendum.”
Even without red lines, the document is “pretty paltry”, said the FT’s Philip Stevens. But that’s not the point. For the Conservatives and parts of the media, adding “a single comma” to existing treaties is “an assault on British sovereignty”. Quite, said James Blitz, also in the FT. Even if Blair defends these red lines, the Conservatives will demand a referendum. Brown will resist, but this may “trigger an early and utterly undesirable confrontation” with the Eurosceptic press. It would also make him look hypocritical, said Nelson, this time in The Spectator. Brown’s pitch as incoming prime minister is that he will be more honest than the “shifty, grinning con-artist” about to depart. If one of the first things he does as PM is to push through a “crucial” treaty without consulting the electorate, it won’t look good.
Maybe not, said Stevens, but vetoing a slimmed-down treaty would also mean missing “a chance to make friends and influence people”. Europe is friendlier to British ideas than in a long time; an alliance with Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Sarkozy would give Brown a “decisive voice” in the EU’s direction. And do the British, “for all their doubts about Europe’s ambitions”, want to be friendless? John Major’s self-imposed isolation was “anything but splendid”.
If Brown’s planned reorganisation of Number 10 is anything to go by, he isn’t that worried about Europe, said Nelson. He wants to move his foreign policy adviser and European adviser out of No 10 and into the Cabinet Office. That may not seem a big move, but such matters carry the “greatest symbolic importance” in Whitehall. And let’s not forget that his best-known contribution to European policy so far has been to keep Britain out of the European single currency, said The Economist. But “larger imperatives may squeeze his room for manoeuvre”. Although Brown has said he is prepared to do so, he will not want to have a referendum, or risk making Europe into the “debilitating issue for his government that it once was for the Tories”.
Neither will he want to be marginalised in European decision-making. Much of what he may hope to achieve internationally will depend on European cooperation, especially if his relationship with Bush is cooler than Blair’s. Brown certainly faces a “string of challenges” as he heads for No 10, says Blitz, but at least he has one thing to be thankful for. As one minister put it: “Gordon’s great advantage is that, unlike Tony, he doesn’t have to deal with a Gordon.”