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Wednesday, Apr 28, 2004

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Blair's mystery U-turn

By Hasan Suroor

Tony Blair's sudden decision to call a referendum on the proposed European Constitution has given rise to speculation on what prompted him to change his mind.

A DAY after the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, took the nation's breath away and put his own job on the line by announcing his decision to call a referendum on the proposed European Constitution, The Times carried a cartoon in which a motorist, apparently lost for directions, suddenly perks up on seeing a U-turn sign and exclaims: "Look, Downing Street should be close by," or something to that effect.

It was a stark summing up of the general reaction to Mr. Blair's dramatic decision, seen set to go into history books as arguably the most inexplicable U-turn of his premiership. Surprise is rather a mild term to capture the mood, which has ranged from sheer bemusement to shock and anger. And it is not difficult to see why. For until the moment he dropped the bombshell on April 20, he had been consistently bullish in ruling out a referendum. He famously described the constitution as simply a "tidying up exercise" that did not fundamentally alter Britain's relations with Europe, and therefore did not warrant public endorsement. Parliament, he insisted, was competent enough to ratify the constitution.

Indeed, he dismissed calls for a referendum as an attempt by Europhobes to subvert the entire European project suggesting that they would use it to question the very idea of closer British integration into Europe. In a BBC interview, a few days before his historic U-turn, he declared "our policy has not changed." And the policy, as he made clear on a previous occasion, was: there will not be a referendum because there is no need for it.

So what happened within a space of a few weeks, or indeed days that prompted him to change his mind? For a Prime Minister who memorably described himself as someone who did not have a "reverse gear" and could go "only one way," it meant eating a "mountain of his own words" as one commentator pointed out. Why, then, did he do it?

There has been no official explanation, but two main theories are doing the rounds — both emanating from anonymous briefings and neither wholly denied or confirmed. One puts it down to Mr. Blair's fear of the Europhobic Tories ahead of the elections to the European Parliament in June, and the British general elections next year. He feared that if the issue was allowed to drag on, the Tories, lacking a winnable positive agenda of their own, would exploit it to run a negative campaign against the Blair Government, accusing it of "surrendering" national sovereignty to a European "superstate" which, they misleadingly claim, is what the constitution proposes. Members of his kitchen Cabinet were apparently able to convince him that he would do well to kill the "Tory fox" before it could do any real damage. The idea was to take the fight into the Tory camp in a bid to deprive it of a potentially point-scoring, if not exactly vote-winning, platform.

Although Mr. Blair has been accused of political "cowardice" by giving in to the Tories, at least this theory makes sense in the short term given the compulsion of electoral politics. But the second theory — if true — has more serious implications and, in the words of The Spectator magazine (itself a rabidly eurosceptic journal), reduces Mr. Blair to the position of a "client of Rupert Murdoch's global empire."

It is stated that Mr. Blair threw in the towel after Mr. Murdoch threatened to switch support to the Tories at the next election if he signed up to the E.U. constitution without putting it to a public vote. Mr. Murdoch, a self-confessed hater of the European Union project, owns The Times, The Sunday Times, the mass-circulation, Sun, and has a stake in Sky TV, all of which together have a considerable influence on public opinion — and in the 1997 elections, Mr. Blair benefited from their combined support. According to an almost identical account, which has appeared in all non-Murdoch papers, cutting across their position on Europe, Mr. Blair was virtually presented with an "ultimatum" from Mr. Murdoch who conveyed it through an intermediary. And even before a formal announcement was made, the Murdoch papers had already gone to town with the forecast that the Prime Minister was about to change his mind.

Having taken the plunge, Mr. Blair faces an uphill task with 68 per cent voters reportedly inclined to say a `no' in a referendum expected after the 2005 general elections. There is speculation that he will "retire" irrespective of the outcome. If he wins, he will have gone some way in realising his goal of putting Britain "at the heart of Europe," and if he loses it would be left to his successor — most likely Chancellor Gordon Brown — to pick up the pieces.

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