Tag Archives: Tony Blair

The FT’s imprecise EU vocabulary

In an otherwise good quality article about former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt’s role in determining the EU institutions response to bailouts by Joshua Chaffin there is nevertheless an issue – the terms the FT uses to explain the EU:

Mr Verhofstadt, the energetic and outspoken leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats in the European parliament [my emphasis]

Strictly Verhofstadt is leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group in the European Parliament (ALDE). As fellow FT correspondent Stanley Pignal states on Twitter, the FT is not intended to be for a Brussels bubble audience. Very true. But I would also hope that FT readers would hope to have correct reporting, and I have much higher hopes for the FT’s reporting than I do for any other UK broadsheet – hence this blog entry.

Reading the line above for someone not versed in the basics of European Parliament politics connects him to the Liberal Democrats, the UK party, who are indeed a member of the ALDE group. But Liberal Democrats and ALDE are not the same thing.

OK, maybe this is a minor case, but there are words to the same effect – simpler than ‘ALDE Group’ – that nevertheless would have been more correct: ‘Liberals and Democrats’ or ‘Liberals and Democrats Group’ for example.

However this is not the first time the FT has used such terms – they routinely referred to Blair’s rumoured candidacy for President of the European Council as ‘President of the EU’ – see this piece and all these titles. The Economist notably takes another line – to use the correct terms, and to assume that readers will inform themselves if they don’t understand.

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Decontaminating the Labour brand

Red glove - CC / Flickr

Red glove - CC / Flickr

I was rather struck my Mark Thompson’s critique of the Labour Party’s current predicament – “I think Labour activists are in danger of underestimating just how damaged their own party brand already is” were the words he used.

I really do not see it in those terms, and here are some thoughts why.

For a start the main characters that have tainted Labour for the last decade are now off the scene – Blair and Brown. Brown’s own ratings were worse than Labour’s and with the prospect of a new leader on the horizon how bad are things for Labour as whole? Not too bad as far as I can tell.

The fact that some of the other hard-to-like ministers from previous administrations – Hewitt, Hoon, Clarke, Prescott – are off the scene also helps.

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Election reform was not going to happen in the late 1990s, so stop bemoaning things now

Blair - CC / Flickr

Blair - CC / Flickr

As coalition negotiations endure between Tories and Lib Dems there’s much bemoaning the chance to reform the UK’s election system supposedly missed by Tony Blair in the years immediately after 1997.

If only Blair had been bold then, we would not be in the mess we’re in today goes the refrain, a line most stridently defended by staunch Lib Dems like my parents and, interestingly, by Timothy Garton Ash in Die Zeit (end of page 1, in German).

Just think a little about the situation Blair faced in those heady days with a majority of 150+. He knew Labour could win a couple more elections from that point, hence he had no incentive whatsoever to change the system, and indeed a bunch of Labour MPs who would have lost their seats that way had an incentive against reform.

In short Blair had an idea of what was right – election reform – but absolutely no incentive to act upon it. To argue that the late 1990s were a missed chance is to completely ignore how games are played within political parties. Altruism alone does not lead to decisions being taken, at least not in the Labour Party.

Now the game is different. Labour needs reform if it is to have any prospect of power any time soon. So the incentive and the altruistic choice are aligned. OK, making this happen in the middle of an economic crisis and coalition talks is perhaps not too handy, but better late than never, and let’s at least be fair in our appraisal of the past.

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We have been at our best when at our boldest – so AV?

Gordon Brown - CC / Flickr

Gordon Brown - CC / Flickr

Two striking phrases appear in Tony Blair’s 2002 Labour Conference speech – the famous “We have been at our best when at our boldest” and a lesser known line “Thanks to the brilliance and vision of Gordon Brown we have succeeded beyond any Labour government“.

Fast forward a little over 7 years, and more than 12 years after Labour’s historic 1997 election victory, and the same Gordon Brown has penned a column in The Guardian where he makes his case for holding a referendum after the election on voting system reform for Westminster. The problem is that the option on the table is the Alternative Vote system – keeping the one MP / one constituency system, but allowing voters to rank candidates. The Electoral Reform Society gives the idea a lukewarm welcome and I’m inclined to agree, but bold this definitely is not – it is at best a compromise. Mark Reckons has more on the issue from a Lib Dem perspective.

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A ‘citizens’ campaign for Mary Robinson starts to roll

Mary Robinson - CC / Flickr

Mary Robinson - CC / Flickr

No sooner have the Irish ratified the Treaty of Lisbon than a campaign starts to try to get an Irish citizen nominated to be President of the European Council – Mary Robinson, former Irish President. If you back her candidacy you can join the Facebook group here – there are more than 1300 members as I write, not bad for a few days of work. More on the issue of a woman for at least one of the three top jobs can be found at Eurosocialist’s blog here.

I’m absolutely in favour of the need for more women in EU top jobs, and Blair’s candidacy makes me rather nervous – Blair at the European Council and Barroso in the Commission will produce only one winner, and it will not be the Portuguese…

But is Mary Robinson the right candidate? She has the right background and standing, and a large number of Irish people I follow on Twitter from across the political spectrum seem to like the idea of her candidacy. Can someone maybe enlighten me as to the reasons why she’s actually good?

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Patten and Blair: two more strong non-starters

Chris Patten - CC / Flickr

Chris Patten - CC / Flickr

Following on from my post about Bildt and Fischer, today is the time to look at two other strong candidates for top jobs in the EU, this time both of them Brits – Chris Patten and Tony Blair. I’m prompted to write this post after the FT carried a story that Patten would be “very positive” about the idea of taking the EU Foreign Minister position later this year.

Firstly, Patten. My first reaction was ‘hell, that’s going to really annoy David Cameron’, and secondly ‘isn’t he too old’.

On the first point, Patten, a former Chairman of the Conservative Party, has been causing a few problems for Cameron and the party leadership lately. He was opposed to the idea of the Tories leaving the EPP-ED group in the Parliament, prompting the young turks in the Tory Party to have a go at him. William Hague has already stated he found Patten’s statement “unwise”. So where is all of this coming from? Surely all of this bears the hallmarks of Gordon Brown and scheming in Whitehall; what better way to hammer home the Tories out of the European mainstream message than appointing one of their own to a top EU position, contrary to Cameron’s wishes?

Secondly, does Patten really have the stomach for this? When he stepped down as a European Commissioner in 2004, then aged 60, these were the lines in the BBC story:

The European commissioner, who lost his seat as MP for Bath in 1992, said he planned to retire, taking up writing, broadcasting and do some “serious gardening”.

“This is the last public service job I will do. When I finish it, I will be 60 and I would like to enjoy my sixties as much as I can,” he said.

There’s also an interesting interview with Patten given at the time in the New York Times. Is he the right person to be haring around the world for the next five years?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt he could do the job, and I also have a lot of time and respect for Patten. But somehow I cannot see all of the pieces of the jigsaw falling into place to make this happen.

Tony Blair - CC / Flickr

Tony Blair - CC / Flickr

The second strong candidate for a top EU position, Tony Blair, this time rumoured to want the position as President of the European Council, a job that would be created if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified. Here the case is much more clear-cut than for Patten. There’s no way politically in the UK that Brown could not be seen to be backing Blair for this job (despite all the bad blood between the two in the past). The problems however are elsewhere. Blair is strong, charismatic, outspoken, and followed the USA to war in Iraq contrary to the wishes of France and Germany. OK, that was in 2003, and Blair still has decent working relationships with some member states, but if Bildt, Fischer or Patten are divisive figures then multiply it by 10 for Blair. CEP Blog has a breakdown on how the voting could work. Yet even after the horrors of the Czech Presidency of the EU and some sort of longing for leadership and coherency in the Justus Lipsius building I cannot see how a consensus for Blair could be achieved.

So I reckon Patten, Blair, Bildt and Fischer are all strong non-starters.

[UPDATE - 6.8.09]
A strong, personal case for Patten is made at Crooked Timber.

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If there’s a problem call Tony

Tony Blair - CC / Flickr

Tony Blair - CC / Flickr

So here we go again. The EU has a multitude of problems on its hands: Russia turning off the gas, the Gaza conflict brewing, and no-one really knowing what to do about the economic downturn, least of all the Commission. The Czech Presidency has already made a few gaffes, and there are sure to be a few more from Klaus and co before the end of their 6 months in the chair.

So what does Europe need? A statesman apparently… Today’s FT (more at Euractiv) is reporting that the idea of having Tony Blair as President of the European Council is doing the rounds once more, back on the agenda one year after Sarkozy originally backed the idea. It seems that Sarko’s clout in the French Presidency has made a few people sit up and think…

But hold on a minute. Why would this idea be any better now than it was 12 months ago? OK, we know what can be done if the EU has some energetic leadership, but a few other factors have changed decisively against Blair. Firstly Blair does not seem to have had much of an impact as Middle East Envoy – would he be a sane face for the EU in that issue? Secondly, two of the major issues facing the EU – economic matters and gas supplies – are a mixture of market matters and foreign policy. Would Blair grandstanding be any good to fix those things? Seems to me that the case for one tough president is stronger than ever, rather than a statesman in the European Council and a weak flaccid lump in the Commission.

And then there’s also the small matter of the referendum in Ireland on the Treaty of Lisbon… If Blair is rumoured once more to want the top job is that going to make it any more or less likely that the Irish are going to vote Yes?

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The era of tribal political leadership is over. Really?

BlairTony Blair has been in California for the last couple of days, and gave a speech to News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch’s media firm) during his visit. Quite apart from the moral issue of whether Blair should be speaking to News Corp in the first place, his speech was both scary and bizarre. The most quoted line of the speech was:

But on policy the cross-dressing is rampant and is a feature of modern politics that will stay. The era of tribal political leadership is over.

So what’s the lead story on the Labour Party website today? Why Cameron is doomed to fail as leader of the Conservatives – read it here. Tribal? Surely not.

Blair also states that the traditional welfare state simply cannot cope in a modern world. As Neal Lawson points out in this reply in the Guardian, Sweden and others seem to manage that quite admirably. He also says that leaders should get on and lead. After having read Lance Price’s book (see previous post), I wonder how often Blair actually does this? His leadership has been severely limited by Iraq and the ongoing sagas with Gordon Brown.

On a positive note, Blair did sign a memorandum on climate change with Arnold Schwarzenegger who is becoming frustrated that the US federal government is ignoring the dangers of climate change. Details of that story here.

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