I am glad to see I am not the only one who thinks the frequently reported ‘sharp exchanges’ between Blair and Chirac (or Shröder) are a phoney as a three pound note. Some of the commenters here on Samizdata.net seems to have taken a similar view as has the Daily Telegraph opinion leader article.
At EU summits, there is always a row and always a deal – and the European constitution negotiations did not disappoint. Tony Blair’s spin doctors did not quite say, “Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here,” but he was, apparently, battling like Henry V against the French and also the Germans. But he signed the constitution anyway, even though last week’s election results clearly show he had no mandate to do so. There was something distinctly phoney about the row.
Indeed. The fact having ‘rows’ with the French and Germans is good for the standing of a British leader hardly needs explaining. Yet the fact is that regardless of the acrimony, the deals still seem to get signed. ‘Red line’ after red line gets laid down, acclaimed by both supporters and people who should know better: “Thus far and no further!” cries our plucky Leader of the Day. Which of course really means “only thus far this time“. Just wait a year or two and the process can be repeated yet again and a little more agreed, once the ‘red lines’ of yesteryear have vanished down the memory hole.
Forget the rhetoric, if you want to know the truth, just look for the signatures on the treaties. The rest is just so much verbal fart gas.
Nah, it was probably a perfectly real row. Chirac has hates being balked, and he was. If the UK hadn’t been there, the result would have been far more federalist. Plus having all the new countries has seriously diluted French political clout. He can’t have been a happy chappie.
Was a real row, bur as Perry says, so much verbal fart gas.
What is the difference between politicians speaking and cattle farting?
Damned if I know!
Just for completeness, I presume you guys don’t have a three pound note?
Julian and Philip – Was not a real row. This was a sop for Mr Wonderful to lob at the British media .
Chirac is the ultimate French statesman. Civilised, thoughtful and charming at all times. Chirac simply would not lose his dignity by losing his temper or exchanging sharp words with anyone. He would attempt suasion and humour. He would listen to opposing points carefully and patiently. At home he may slam his knife down on his plate and shout at his wife, who knows … but he would not compromise the dignity of the office of President of France by losing his temper in a diplomatic context. No. No way. The “row” (which was only “reported”; no one seems to have actually witnessed it) never happened.
Schroeder I know nothing about. But Chirac, no.
Of course the French media and German media will also be lapping it up. The story suits everyone.
Jonathan L – Exactly.
This was on the front page of last Wednesday’s Independent and it is worth reading in full. I showed it to an aquaintance who voted UKIP and he didn’t know any of it!
The £23bn question for the Europhobes
After UKIP’s shock successes in the European elections, Tony Blair said yesterday withdrawal would be ‘extraordinary foolishness’. So what would it mean for Britain?
Economy
Britain would suffer a permanent loss of £23bn a year if we pulled out, says the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, an independent think-tank.
Economic growth would be lower by 2.5 per cent, according to some leading economists’ estimates. Withdrawal could trigger a loss of confidence in UK economic prospects, possibly causing a run on the pound, leading to a rise in inflation through higher import costs, unemployment and interest rates.
More volatile interest rates would add to the risks of boom and bust in the housing markets.
Travel
100,000 Britons work in EU countries and 450,000 Britons live in them, including 200,000 pensioners.
British holidaymakers have the right to free health care in any member state with the E111 form.
EU airline deregulation has halved the cost of flights, causing a massive travel expansion. EU rules now mean airlines must offer compensation if they overbook.
Cheaper flights – and a strong economy – have contributed to a massive increase in British people owning second homes in EU countries. Withdrawal could make house purchasing more difficult.
Social reform
Withdrawal from the European Union would reverse fundamental employment and social welfare rights that UK citizens have enjoyed for more than 30 years.
Workers would be unable to bring sex, race or disability claims against their employers.
The 48-hour working week, regular breaks between shifts and a minimum 11-hour rest between shifts would also be obsolete. There would no longer be a statutory four-weeks annual holiday.
EU directives give two weeks’ statutory paternity leave and increased maternity leave.
Trade
British businesses enjoy tariff-free access to the largest market in the world; 55 per cent of the UK’s trade is with the EU. Every year the UK imports £129bn worth of goods from its EU partners and exports £105bn to them; the total is more than half of all our global trade.
In contrast, trade with the US is £52bn annually, about 12 per cent of the total. Not in these figures are services, such as banking and insurance, worth £160bn a year, which might be hit by withdrawal.
Some 3.2 million jobs are directly associated with the export of goods and services to the EU. About 750,000 businesses trade with our EU partners.
We need the EU more than it needs us: 9.5 per cent of the UK economy is trade with the rest of the EU; the reverse figure is 2.4 per cent. If Britain withdrew, businesses would have to obey EU regulations to trade with Europe, without power to amend them.
Inward investment, which has fallen since the UK stayed outside the euro, would fall further outside the EU.
Law & the constitution
An army of lawyers and two or three full parliamentary terms would be needed to disentangle Britain from Europe.No one has any idea of the cost.
The Government would have to repeal hundreds of EU directives in UK law.
Britain would have to recall its judges from the European Court of Justice, losing a forum for settling arguments.
British representation at the European Parliament and Commission would end. Trading laws that would affect us would be passed without consideration of their effect on British interests
In October 2000 Britain incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. By withdrawing from the convention and repealing this legislation British citizens would no longer be protected by a set of fundamental human rights
Environment
There are more than 200 EU laws on the environment, ranging from recycling to clean beaches.
Catalytic converters would not have been made compulsory without the EU and there would have been no ban on leaded petrol.
The 1994 EU habitats directive bans interference in breeding places of endangered species. It has been used by campaigners to prevent roads, housing and industrial projects.
Wild birds in Britain are protected by the EU birds directive.
The EU bathing water directive has led to a big improvement in beachesMore than half now meet European standards.
EU curbs on sulphur emissions from French and Spanish power stations limit acid rain that falls in Britain.
Consumer
The cost of phone calls has halved thanks to the EU’s liberalisation of the telecoms market.
The cost of electricity to consumers fell by 6.5 per cent between 1996 and 2001.
EU deregulation has introduced competition on airline routes once jealously protected by national airlines.
The European Commission has taken action against the British Government over customs officers stopping travellers bringing unlimited amounts of alcohol and tobacco for their own use into the UK.
Defence
Withdrawal would exclude Britain from future peace-keeping in crisis-hit regions.
It would deal a heavy blow to Britain’s influence in military planning.
Contracts for military hardware, including the troubled Eurofighter, would be threatened, as would thousands of jobs.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=531995
If the Independent’s report was in any way accurate or reliable, one would think that Blair & Co would be trumpeting this information to the high heavens. It will take more than a report in the Independent to convince me that the UK wouldn’t benefit from withdrawal from the EU.
A.F. –
I’m at a loss to understand why the Indy claims withdrawal from the EU would require the UK to repeal any directive that is already law here. (Though it might not be a bad thing to lose them.) Does it think that somehow by magic it would be as if the last 30 years–all the good things as well as all the bad things–never happened–that it was all a dream?
If this is the quality of argument they marshall then Ted Heath starts to look like a persuasive spokesman for the project.
BTW, the Eurofighter isn’t an EU project, even if it does have “euro” in the name. It is a completely independent waste of money that could and should be scrapped.
I don’t think Bliar and chums will follow this line, Henry Kaye, because the non-endorsement of the Constitution (whoever gets there first) just isn’t equivalent to withdrawal. The EU will carry on as before, steadily accreting power until the next attempt.
Besides, a lot of the things that the Indy inaccurately believes would happen on withdrawal might be popular. The Yes camp will choose its line a bit more carefully.
That was mostly a load of old cobblers. For one thing, Britain was already protecting its wild birds without a busybody EU directive. And there should be no limit to the number of hours someone can work if he comes to an arrangement whereby he feels he’s amply rewarded. (Save people whose fatigue would be dangerous to the public.) These arguments are all statist.
Britain has been governing itself very well for several centuries without benefit of guidance from Belgium, thanks.
I’m sort of interested where that figure attributed to the NIESR comes from. There’s nothing on their website, tho’ it would be a fairly big story if that dramatic. Perhaps the Indecipherable has been going through its Britain In Europe cuttings, because the now-defunct EU fan club did have some, er, dealings with the NIESR:–
I’m interested where that figure attributed to the NIESR comes from. There’s nothing on their website, tho’ it would be a fairly big story if that dramatic. Perhaps the Indecipherable has been going through its Britain In Europe cuttings, because the now-defunct EU fan club did have some, er, dealings with the NIESR:–
It’s hard to decide which is the more impressive – the number of times those spurious Independent (sic) claims have been disproved, or the newspaper’s transparent desperation in repeating them.
To go through the entire list would take too long so by the magic of random selection, let’s just look at the last four.
1/ British customs officers have continued to do precisely what Gordon Brown has told them to – regardless of the actions of either the EU or the British courts. It’s scandalous, but there you are. Certainly it’s no proof of EU effectiveness – rather the exact opposite.
2/ Withdrawal would have no effect of Britain’s role in peace keeping, which is usually an Anglo-American activity. More to the point, without the expertise of Britain’s armed forces, any EU contingent would be a completely irrelevant.
3/Britain’s military planning in what? We are already second dog in NATO. In what way would this be changed by EU withdrawal, other than strengthened? This is clear and transparent nonsense.
4/ Eurofighter is an outdated aeroplane, with which we should never have been involved anyway – even were it an EU project, which it is not. The government is already trying to sell some of those on order in an undignified car boot sale, so as to avoid having them sat on RAF airfelds, quietly rusting, when they are finally delivered.
As for the rest of defence spending, if the EU really wants to exclude us from its defence markets, where will it be selling the surplus Bosches, BMWs and Renaults it will find itself stuck with?
What a truly pathetic attempt to scare the children that list was. Only readers of such a piss-poor newspaper could possibly fall for it.
Withdrawal could trigger a loss of confidence in UK economic prospects, possibly causing a run on the pound, leading to a rise in inflation through higher import costs, unemployment and interest rates.
Just like withdrawal from the ERM did, then?
Actually I have been wondering why the federasts don’t at least attempt making a case for Federalism rather than just complaining that Tony Blair hasn’t been making the case.
If this is the best they can do, no wonder TB is keeping quiet.
As a practical consideration, if the political will to leave the EU was there, it would be necessary for Britain to negotiate terms of trade with the EU and we would end up with something which would give the lie to those scare stories.
Back to Perry’s original point, yes, the “row” was largely a fake but it never ceases to amaze me how the media buy the idea. You would have thought that the hard-bitten cynics of the British press would smell this a mile off.
My hunch is that the voters will say no in a referendum. I was watching Channel 4 news a short while ago and they wheeled out poor old Michael Heseltine to bleat about how we have to be “in Europe2 (ie, sign up to the whole federal lunacy) in order to have any influence as a trading nation. It shows how desperate the pro-EU federalists are that they should have to use an argument as transparently dumb as this. Britain has the fifth biggest economy in the world — I’d have thought we could cope without holding nanny’s hand in Brussels.
Johnathan Pearce writes:
” they wheeled out poor old Michael Heseltine to bleat about how we have to be “in Europe2 (ie, sign up to the whole federal lunacy) in order to have any influence as a trading nation.”
What the hell anyone imagines Heseltine knows about international trade is quite beyond me. The fact that he made his money publishing some third rate magazines doesn’t qualify him – and he had an absolutely appalling career as a minister.
Not as bad as Michael Howard’s record as a minister:
As Local Government minister he introduced the disastrously unfair Poll Tax, which produced riots and unseated PM Thatcher.
As Employment Secretary, Unemployment rose by over 1 MILLION.
He predicted an economic recovery from recession just before interest rates hit 15% – resulting in 150,000 families having their homes repossesed.
As Home Secretary he promised to increase police numbers – and cut them by over 1,000.
In 2002 the same incompetent Michael Howard said, “The creation of a political union in Europe – whether you call it a single European state or a United states of Europe or anything else – is a noble ambition. It is an entirely legitimate ambition”
MAYBE IT’S NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA.
Anyway I’m pleased you spent your weekend convincing yourselves that racism does not exist between the peoples of Europe – all those neo fascists must be a figment of my imagination.
Turks and Indians being Caucasian must mean its not racism when some right wing skinhead firebombs their letter box.
Of course this never happens, non?
During the course of the same weekend Tone Boy got his way in Europe on all his red line policies and agreed to sign up to the new EU constitutuion.
Oh I agree that Howard was a horrendous home secretary ans anyone who is driven to despare by David Blunkett can hardly hold Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard up as a cheerful replacement. That is why I keep suggesting people vote UKIP or even Monster Raving Loony Party rather than vote Tory.
But the notion the ‘red lines’ were preserved is laughable.
And this is not going to result in the EU gradually taking over UK employment law and eventually taxation? How do you read that into such phrases? Like most EU documents, it does not actually say “Brussels will determine what employment law pertain in Britain” but how else can you read that? And if ‘economic policy’ is involved, are you serious about the EU staying out of issues regarding UK taxation? Chirac et al have made their feelings clear about ‘unfair UK taxation policies’ so why give them the very weapon then need to avoid what they call ‘harmful tax competition’ (i.e. ‘harminising tax to the highest level)? Time after time, British governments claim ‘victory’ in Europe and the result of that ‘victory’ is more EU regulation. So Tone Boy has come back with ‘peace in our time’, eh, Syon Park?
No Perry. Your dogma has apparently blinded you to the real events in Europe.
The new European landscape of 25 nation states has put an end to French / German domination. There is no more ‘EU regulation’ than there was last Friday.
Fear not. Your world will not end. Start looking at it positively – we can have a Europe that WE WANT because of the influence the UK currently has. Compare that with the 1980’s when we had no influence and continually got stitched up.
You remind me of the sceptical Celt Perriwald Havillbert who, in 653 AD said:
“And this is not going to result in the Anglo Saxons gradually taking over ancient Britons employment law and eventually taxation? How do you read that into such phrases? Like most Anglo Saxon documents, it does not actually say “Winchester will determine what employment law pertain in Briton” but how else can you read that? And if ‘economic policy’ is involved, are you serious about the Anglo Saxons staying out of issues regarding Britons taxation? …Time after time, Celtic leaders claim ‘victory’ against these foreigners and the result of that ‘victory’ is more Anglo Saxon regulation. It makes me sick…you sell out your culture etc etc…if we’re not careful all tribal areason this island will be united into a super kingdom ”
Clearly I do not share your dogma (‘a craving for regulation by the political class’), but what exactly do you think my dogma is?
‘we can have a Europe We want’? Who is we? The only EU I want is one without Britain and ideally no EU at all.
As for your example, well, the Saxons did indeed destroy Celtic Briton…though that said, I would be delighted to see the break up of the UK and an independent Ulster, Scotland, Wales and England… and why stop there? Wessex anyone? Works for me.
It appears your dogma is guided by whatever appears in The Daily Telegraph each morning. (This wretched rag is as lacking in credibility and true journalism as the communist ‘Morning Star’ – the main difference being the Morning Star doesn’t have a sports section).
Perry like it or not you live in Europe. WE are the inhabitants of Europe. Peaceful union of those nation states that comprise Europe is a truly historic moment. With modernisation and reform, I hope this idea (and implicitly WE) are successful – and that within one hundred years this union can spread east and south to Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Perhaps with it can spread peace, prosperity and an end to conflict and poverty.
While the rest of the world moves forward you can maybe go back 1500 years by living in Perry-land (or should that be Havilland?), pulling up the drawbridge and fighting with the inhabitants of the next village.