eurealist.co.uk

Anatole Kaletsky in the Times suggests that Blair has the opportunity enjoyed by no other British leader, at least since the Second World War. The question is how he can play the strong hand that fate has dealt him.

Simple really “Mr Blair can start by explaining why the EU constitution has failed. The voters of France and the Netherlands did not reject the principle of a constitution. What they voted against was the particular constitution offered by the EU’s governing elite. The reasons for this rejection are clear. The proposed constitution would have reinforced and then entrenched forever the worst features of the EU status quo: lack of democracy, excessive centralisation and economic dysfunction.”

Kaletsky says “These are the three great evils that Mr Blair must now try to overcome”

“Mr Blair’s challenge is to recognise such concepts and use them to redefine the “European project”. Instead of trying to create a homogenised euro-culture or single economic “model”, European countries should turn their inherent diversity to mutual advantage through economic competition and cultural exchange.

How could Mr Blair move Europe in this direction? By doing something unthinkable to Europe’s political classes, but blindingly obvious to voters: demanding the return of powers to nation governments from Brussels. In diplomatic jargon, he must start to unravel the acquis communautaire. The acquis is a convention that asserts that any responsibility transferred to Brussels can never be renationalised. It guarantees an irreversible accretion of power to the EU. Mr Blair should, as a matter of principle, announce his opposition to this anti-democratic juggernaut. He should show what he means in practice by proposing repatriation of specific policies, starting with issues such as regulations on working time and consumer protection, but aiming eventually for the biggest and most expensive policy — agriculture.

Even more important than disavowing the acquis, Mr Blair could emphasise the diversity of Europe by rejecting the concept of a single economic model to be followed by every EU country. The EU’s official economic policy (known as the Lisbon Agenda) is to create “the world’s most competitive economy by 2010”. This objective is not just embarrassingly unattainable, but deeply misguided. Europe is not a single economy. It is a single market; a community of democratic nations, whose citizens choose different economic and social priorities.”

In fact all Mr Blair has to do is to dismantle the EU and start again, I am quite sure that this will go down like the proverbial lead balloon in the halls of Brussels, and those who have spent the last fifty years taking the EU in exactly the opposite direction will welcome with open arms the destruction of the European dream.