Tony Blair praised Ed Miliband for not offering an EU referendum and declared his enthusiastic support for a Miliband premiership. Given the political chasm that separates the New Labour project and Miliband, this must have been quite a challenge.
Supporting Miliband on the EU question was perhaps the only solution.
The good news is that Blair’s utterings will most likely serve to remind voters of his disastrous legacy and the bitter feud between himself and Gordon Brown that helped wreck Britain (although ironically, this feud prevented Blair from imposing the euro disaster on us). Why did Blair resurface? One suspects that the motivation lies in his unrequited love for the position of EU president and thus the need to further burnish his credentials for the top job. Blair’s stance will be music to the ears of the EU commissars who, like himself, do not enjoy the nuisance of democracy.
Putting aside his motives, it must be said that Blair illuminates the referendum issue like no other star in the political universe. But unfortunately, for him, he has been consistently wrong about the EU. Just imagine if Britain had followed his lead to adopt the euro, today we would most likely, like Greece, be bankrupt and begging Germany for war reparations!
Second, whether through incompetence or malice (apparently the latter) opening the doors to the flood of East Europeans was an act of national vandalism. Blair’s hypocrisy is also breath taking. While claiming that Britain would be diminished outside the EU, in reality he sees the EU as the means to dissolve Britain entirely, having himself set the ball rolling with UK devolution.
So now, as then, the notion peddled by Blair that leaving the EU would imperil Britain is highly questionable. Rather, the danger for Britain is staying in the EU, with the associated and ever increasing democratic deficit that will ultimately tear Europe asunder.
What of the specifics? Blair superficially claims that Britain¹s departure from the EU would bring economic chaos but (inevitable short-term disruption
notwithstanding) this is probably unlikely. The EU is an economic basket case (except Germany) and the fast emerging markets around the globe are increasingly more significant for Britain¹s prosperity. If Blair truly cherishes Britain’s global reach then escaping the EU will free up our arms.
The more profound issues are, however, not economic but political.
The EU has always been a politically driven vanity project, fraudulently presented in shabby economic clothing by a self-serving political class who wish to create a single country.
By design the EU is necessarily in the process of forming a political union required to save the euro currency. Britain will never be part of the emerging solution but the electorate feels disenfranchised by the europhilic stance of the mainstream political parties, who continue to exhibit a brazen disregard for their duty of care to the nation.
The bottom line is that the majority of citizens, regardless of their persuasion, now demand to have a say, and for politicians to deny them at such an historic juncture is untenable.
