Aquae Sulis (Bath),
England. 30 November. Bath Spa, this most quintessential English town,
surrounds perfectly-preserved AD 43 Roman thermal baths and adorns the deep
valley of the River Avon with rows of Georgian villas clad in golden, sunset-shade
Cotswold stone. It is a place seemingly
impervious to change. And yet, if Tony
Blair has his way, Bath and the rest of the England over which his fiat once
ran, will cease to self-govern for the first time in almost a thousand years. In a speech this week to Chatham House Blair
was at his dissembling best. He accused
Prime Minister Cameron of committing a “monumental error” by seeking to forge a
new relationship for Britain with the EU and described Euro-scepticism as a
“virus”. As ever with Blair it is not
what he said that is interesting, but what he did not say.
Typically, Blair failed
to address the real question; why so many of we Britons (both ancient and
young) who have hitherto been either pro-EU or EU-neutral are now joining the
ranks of the Euro-realists?
Indeed, on the day the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) made
serious electoral gains Blair made no attempt whatsoever to address the very
real and just concerns of people who feel betrayed by a government he led who
quietly passed over so much of Britain’s sovereignty to a Brussels increasingly
impervious to national accountability.
This was Tony Blair at his disingenuous
worst.
What Blair did not say
was that the last time the British people were given the chance to vote on a
history-cleaving relationship with Brussels was back in 1975. Then the question was whether or not Britain
should remain a member of an economic community made up of independent European
nation-states. Back then no-one other
than a few Euro-federalist fanatics could have foreseen the wholesale transfer
of British political and parliamentary sovereignty to Brussels that has since
taken place. A Brussels that he helped
to build and which today has power and influence over ordinary Britons that
no-one would have possibly agreed to back in 1975. Instead, Blair paints a picture of a nothing
much has changed Brussels and an EU of today that will be the EU of
tomorrow. Nothing could be further from
the truth.
This week’s European
Commission paper on “deep and genuine” banking and fiscal union demonstrates
the lie that Tony Blair is peddling.
Come 2014 a new EU treaty will be drafted. By Blairite definition it will be the next, decisive step on
the road to an undemocratic European super-bureaucracy with which no-one in Britain
should have any truc. Indeed, if
ratified this treaty could well represent the beginning of the end of national self-government
in Europe.
At the very least the
political space that Blair claims Britain can occupy between the single
currency and the single market will cease to exist. Blair knows this but will never of course
admit it because by his calculation he personally stands to benefit. Blair figures that come the end of Herman van
Rompuy’s term as EU Pretend President two years hence in November 2014 he is
well-placed to succeed. His reasoning is
clear; as Germany endeavours to push the new treaty towards ratification a
showdown with Britain is inevitable. One
way to help buy off the British is to make a Briton EU ‘President’. Blair has himself well and truly pencilled in
for that job.
In his Chatham House
speech he said that a British departure from the EU would be
“politically-debilitating, economically-damaging and hugely destructive of
Britain’s true long-term interests”. He
also said Britain could join the Euro within five years. The latter demonstrates just how far out of
touch Blair has become. The former
demonstrates how little regard Blair has for the one word he did not mention –
democracy. It is a democratic deficit
that Tony Blair glossed over, in that Tony Blair way of glossing over the
inconveniently critical.
Ironically (and hopefully),
Blair and his sell his country down the swanny personal ambitions might just be
confounded by a most unlikely and unexpected adversary. This week the German
paper Der Spiegel ran a headline “Grossbritannien Danke!” Germans, they said, should thank the British
for saving Europe from a bureaucratic monster.
It was George
Washington who warned that “Arbitrary power is most easily established on the
ruins of liberty abused”. Blair talked
of a “real and present danger to Britain” if it left the EU. The real danger is
the end to self-governance posed by the future EU he champions.
Tony Blair, the man who
would be king (again).
Julian Lindley-French
