If you want to know why Tony Blair’s attack on Britain’s feral press is both true and important, then look at yesterday’s Sun. Seven Days to Save Britain is the Murdoch tabloid’s rallying cry, framed by pictures of Nelson, Churchill and the queen, and above a cartoon in which a couple in lederhosen and Viking helmets are complaining to a neighbor about the new European dress code that has been imposed on them by Blair’s “stealth deal” with Brussels.
Understand this. The country’s best-selling newspaper has now warned Gordon Brown that he must choose between a deal with France and Germany on next week’s prospective European Union treaty or winning the next general election. Rupert Murdoch’s terms could hardly be plainer.
Reject the treaty and keep the support of the Sun. Accept the treaty and lose the Sun. If words mean anything, then these say: Who rules? The elected government or the unelected press?
Maybe we are only hearing a media hurdy-gurdy man grinding out an old tune to which no one listens any longer. Even so, only a fool would dismiss Murdoch’s threat lightly. The Sun has been decisive — or been felt to be so — in the results of every general election since at least 1979. A party leader with a serious prospect of forming a government cannot but stop and think about the stakes involved in defying News International over Europe. Of course, the cringing to Murdoch has been hard to bear all these years but you can’t deny that, in its way, it has been a politically rational act.
Perhaps, however, the moment has arrived when it is no longer necessary. After all, the case for the negative Euro-skepticism which Murdoch affects to command at moments such as this has never been weaker than it is today. Europe’s economic momentum looks better and better, with forecast growth for 2007 higher than in the US, and unemployment at last beginning to fall. Even European productivity growth is now slightly ahead of America’s. Europe’s equity market capitalization has now also overtaken that of the US, a powerful indicator that global investors have confidence in Europe’s strength and prospects. Deregulation in France over the next five years is likely to give a decisive boost on all these fronts.
All this has happened amid, and partly because of, a steady shift in European thinking in the direction favored by most people in this country. The commission under Barroso, which would not exist if it had not been for the Blair government, is the least federalist and the most pragmatic in the EU’s history. EU competition policy has been liberalized in ways that directly and materially benefit millions in eastern as well as western Europe. Germany now has its most Anglophile chancellor since Helmut Schmidt, and France has just elected its first non-Anglophobic leader since perhaps Louis Napoleon.
Above all, there is a clear shift in emphasis now taking place across Europe from internal to external priorities. When people, here as elsewhere, are asked what they want and do not want from the EU, they say they want Europe to use its strength to shape the answer to global challenges and not to spend all its time trying to create the United States of Europe so beloved of the postwar generation of EU founders.
They want Europe to focus on free trade, action against climate change, and security of energy supplies, to maximize its influence in Africa, the Middle East and in international institutions. They recognize that Europe can do these things more effectively together than as individual states — and they understand that, until this happens, the world will be shaped by powers such as Russia, China and the US, which either despise or ignore Europe’s concerns.
Yet if they want these things to happen, the EU’s constitutional issue has to be solved first. It is not true that things have been rubbing along well since the French and Dutch rejected the old EU Constitution two years ago. That would only be the case if we wanted Europe to do nothing at all. Yet we have an agenda that cannot be held up. Several countries refuse, for instance, to consider further EU enlargement in the western Balkans until the constitution is resolved.
Without it, Europe is also punching below its weight on external issues like the Middle East or Darfur. So the strategic case for getting the constitutional impasse out of the way is indisputable.
That is not the same as saying that anything goes. That is why the detailed outcome of next week’s Brussels summit matters. But it matters less because the wrong outcome is such a threat, than because the right outcome is such an opportunity. And this in turn is why it is so important to grasp that the national interest is not simply something to defend against foreigners but something to be extended and advanced among partners.
Blair, ever-optimistic and with no more elections to fight, is confident that Britain’s main outstanding issues — the status of the EU foreign policy coordinator, an opt-out on justice and home affairs, and the nonbinding status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights — can be resolved satisfactorily. Brown, looking at every issue from the perspective of a man with a difficult general election to win, talks a tougher game, where the bar is set high and compromise is a word not to be used. Both men say that they are working well together. I have uncovered no evidence this is untrue.
The crunch issue is the referendum. For different reasons, neither Blair nor Brown wants it. But Blair wants the treaty to go through Parliament because ultimately he is a believer in Europe. Brown wants it to go through because he cannot afford to lose a referendum before the election. For Brown, who has cultivated the Murdoch and Rothermere press so assiduously, the temptation to demand that Blair vetoes the whole effort next week must remain very strong. Perversely, both the Tories and the Lib Dems must also be praying that he gets them off the hook by doing so.
And so the stage is set, not just for a major strategic moment in Britain’s relations with the EU, but for the last argument between the two men who have together dominated and disabled British politics for a decade. How telling it is that, once again, the climax is coming over Europe, the issue on which the media has asserted its grip over British politics and government for so long.
