The Times, Comment of William Rees-Mogg

Do you know what lunch engagement the Prime Minister kept last Thursday? Was it with European business leaders? No, that was his breakfast photocall. Was it with the President of the United States? No, that was on Friday. Was it with the Spanish Prime Minister? No, he saw him later on Thursday afternoon. The date was January 30. Was the Prime Minister, by any chance, attending a religious service in memory of Charles, King and martyr, who was executed on that day 354 years ago? A good answer to a crossword clue, but not the right entry for Tony Blair’s diary.
His lunch was with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the elderly former President of France who is chairman of the Convention on the European Constitution. Giscard was accompanied, according to the Brussels website, by Sir John Kerr, the former head of the Foreign Office, who is now the Secretary-General of the European Convention. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss the draft constitution which will be published this summer.

The constitution will be the subject of an inter-governmental conference in the autumn, or early next year, which will negotiate a new European treaty, far more extensive than any previous treaty. The Conservative Party representative at the convention, David Heathcoat-Amory, has rightly described it as “bigger than the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice rolled together”. The European constitution is the historic issue we all ought to be thinking about, but most of us are not, on the feeble excuse that we are bored with Europe.

Most readers will not have been aware that this lunch meeting took place. That is not because it was a secret meeting, but because the Downing Street press machine, aka Alastair Campbell, decided to give it the minimalist treatment.

I knew about it for two reasons. On Thursday morning the Financial Times had published a briefing from Brussels, from its correspondent George Parker. As the briefing included a quotation from Peter Hain, the British ministerial envoy to the convention, I assume that he must have been the source. I have been following the convention particularly closely, partly because our youngest daughter, Annunziata, is now the editor of the European Journal, which is the respected intellectual voice of the European Foundation. The foundation’s chairman is Bill Cash; the Journal has followed the convention in greater detail than any other periodical I have read. The articles by David Heathcoat-Amory have been very informative.

I put the FT story to the Downing Street press office. I formed the impression that the friendly young man who answered the telephone had been instructed to reveal as little as he possibly could. Certainly Downing Street was less forthcoming than the Hain briefing, which perhaps means that Peter Hain had gone beyond his brief. After three telephone calls I managed to get a specific confirmation that the Giscard lunch had actually taken place. Even so, there was no mention of Sir John Kerr.

All that Downing Street would admit was that the lunch had formed part of “ongoing discussions about qualified majority voting” in the light of the extension of EU membership from 15 to 25 countries. Even Euro-specialists yawn at “ongoing discussions of QMV”. I commented that this seemed a very guarded statement, and that I would take the FT story as an official briefing unless Downing Street identified any reservations they had about it. No such correction was forthcoming. Unfortunately the FT briefing revealed that the Prime Minister had decided to make further concessions even before he swapped canapés with the ever plausible Giscard.

In Brussels, Peter Hain had already admitted — on the record — that: “This convention was always going to be about reaching consensus and giving way on some issues.” We already knew that Tony Blair had decided to agree a further massive transfer from British self-government to European bureaucracy. He said as much in his Cardiff speech on November 28, even if he wrapped it up in jargon talk about “communitising the pillars”. That means transferring power over policy to Europe. The Cardiff speech was also strangely under-reported — the BBC, apart from its Europhile bias, has been particularly ineffective in coverage of the convention.

Blair’s agreement to discuss a constitution was already a concession in itself; originally he was opposed to it. His concessions to a United States of Europe include the extension of majority voting in foreign policy, the election by MEPs of the European Commission President, the creation of an embryonic EU diplomatic service and the adoption of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. These concessions all move towards a single European state; they have not been adequately debated in Parliament. Tony Blair’s Cardiff speech was under-reported partly because he did not make it in the House of Commons, as any previous Prime Minister would have done. Even Iain Duncan Smith has not raised these questions in the House of Commons — it is time that he did. Tony Blair also seems willing to accept the two-presidents model for Europe, a President of the Commission selected by MEPs and a full-time President to the Council.

It is intolerable that Britain should be shunted into a United States of Europe like a blindfolded camel being backed into a packing case. None of these historic issues has been properly discussed in Parliament. The Government still denies that we are being taken into a single European state, destroying our democratic ability to change our own government.

It was not what the British voted for in 1997, nor in 2001. It has never appeared in a Labour manifesto. If we suffer the loss of our democracy, we shall have been defrauded, against the consistent will of the electorate. The dangers of transferring sovereignty to a single European state without genuine consent are only too obvious. We should have to kick our way out of the packing case, and we should be entitled to do so.

How could genuine consent be achieved? A whipped vote in the House of Commons would not be enough. At present, the Conservative Party is the only party committed to a referendum on the European constitution, as well as on the euro. The constitution is much the more important of the two, just as the constitution of the United States is more important than the Federal Reserve Board. The Liberal Democrats have not yet decided. They welcome the Giscard convention, but they quite genuinely like democracy as well. I believe that they will eventually come down in favour of a constitutional referendum.

Characteristically, the Government is still opposed to a referendum; it is negotiating away Britain’s independence at private lunch parties without regard for public opinion. These are secret agreements, secretly arrived at. In November 2001 Peter Hain gave a House of Commons reply, arguing that ratification of the new European constitution would not require a referendum.

Even the French see that is impossible. Recent official leaks to the French press suggest that the French Government will propose a simultaneous set of national referendums, which would presumably take place in 2004 or 2005, after the new constitutional treaty had been agreed by the European governments. In Britain that would come uncomfortably close to the next general election.

In the meantime Tony Blair needs to reflect on the problems he is creating for himself. He is a politician with a multiple case of the straddles. He straddles the Labour Government itself, imposing some post-Thatcherite policies on a post-socialist party. He straddles the Atlantic, trying to combine the role of the great leader of Europe with being President Bush’s best buddy. He straddles Europe itself, simultaneously part of the new Europe and of the old, now cosying up to the smaller nations and now appeasing the Franco-German alliance.

On the European constitution, he straddles the democratic and federalist positions, the Europe of nations and the nation of Europe. None of us is meant to notice, or object. Each week his straddles grow wider; on Europe, Blair is doing the splits. If he did not accept a constitutional referendum for Britain, his Government would deserve to self-destruct. The British instinct is not for secret empire building, but for open democracy.