New Labour and the European Union

Blair and Brown's logic of history

Oliver Daddow

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719076411
• eBook ISBN: 9781847794925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's attempt to sell the European ideal to the British people. New Labour came to power in 1997 promising to modernize the country and make it fit for the twenty-first century. In foreign policy, Blair and Brown set about rethinking core components of the British national identity, especially the country's relationship to its past and its role in the world. Rebranding Britain, they argued, meant helping the British people feel comfortably at home in the European Union. What did New Labour achieve and did its European policy succeed? How did Blair and Brown try and persuade the British to accept a European future? What were the obstacles they faced and the strategies they used to overcome them?This timely study of New Labour's effort to build a 'pro-European consensus' in Britain argues that the government failed to live up to its early promises. Based on evidence from well over one hundred of Blair and Brown's foreign policy speeches supplemented by interviews with policy-makers, advisers and speech-writers from the time, the book is sympathetic to the challenge New Labour set itself but also critical of the rhetorical techniques it used to advance the Europeanist cause. Trapped between a broadly hostile media and an apathetic public, Blair and Brown failed to provide the necessary leadership to see Britain to a European future. Theoretically informed, empirically robust and methodologically innovative, this novel book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary British foreign policy, the New Labour project and Euroscepticism in Britain.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Re-reading my speeches about Europe over the years, at the beginning, the task was to put Britain back at the centre of the European debate. We did so but it was never easy. There was always a feeling that at best, the British role was to be the pebble in the shoe; the thing that made others stop and think; but not the one that did the walking. (Blair 2006a)

But because of the intense pressures that arise from globalisation, Europe is now entering the second stage of its history as a union and is finding that the agenda relevant to its first phase – the era of a trade bloc – is quite different for its second stage – the Europe facing global competition. (Brown 2004d)

This book studies Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s combined attempt to sell the idea of a European future to the British people. It does so by analysing the propaganda offensive on which the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer embarked after coming into office in May 1997 to convert a hesitant, broadly Eurosceptical public into a nation comfortable with the prospect of taking a full and active part in the life and work of the European Union (EU). Patchy at best in opposition, mainly to avoid opening itself up to attack on the thorny question of ‘Europe’, New Labour’s thinking on foreign policy developed rapidly once in office. This book explores the lengths to which Blair and Brown were prepared to go to inform, persuade and cajole the British public into believing that being at the heart of European decision-making was in the country’s best interests economically, politically, strategically and, crucially, emotionally and psychologically. It is, in essence, an account of New Labour’s tricky encounter with pervasive and deeply rooted discourses about ‘Europe’ in Britain, as well as the tactics the government deployed to undermine them. When all is said and done, however, it shows how the government failed to make anything other than a faint impression on a nation deeply mired in its nationalist past. My aim in writing the book has been to cast some new and much-needed light on the ideas underpinning New Labour’s propaganda in favour of a European future. By considering the logic underpinning Blair and Brown’s arguments about the British in Europe, I have tried to bring to centre stage an aspect of New Labour’s foreign policy that has been strangely overlooked in the existing literature: political speeches.

Whatever the technological changes and challenges wrought by globalization and the twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week news media, political leaders still have to use the conventional tools of language, persuasion and image to try to shape the contours of national political debates, as well as those conducted in regional and global organizations. They have done this in increasingly creative ways, and New Labour invested as much time in office as any modern government in developing its strategic communications around media-friendly soundbites and messages. Maintaining consensus around existing norms, values and practices is one thing; generating a consensus around new sets of norms, values and practices can be extremely arduous given the nature of the environment into which a leader’s targeted information missile is fired. Over the vexed question of Europe, however, this is exactly what Blair and Brown tried to do. The government’s ambition was simple: to build a ‘new consensus’ (Brown 1997e) around the idea that Britain should play an active and wholehearted part in the EU through a policy described as ‘constructive engagement with Europe’ (Brown 1998f; Brown 1999d). To achieve this Blair, Brown and their teams set about rethinking the meaning of the national past in the present. By devising and espousing a new discourse they hoped to convey their approach pithily and as convincingly as possible. As New Labour saw it, British national history was overwhelmingly used by Eurosceptics to point up the differences between Britain and the British on the one hand and Europe and the Europeans on the other. The meaning of the past for Eurosceptics pointed the British away from Europe and therefore limited the legitimacy of any proactively European-ist policy platform. Blair and Brown wanted to recast the British national past as part of European and, indeed, global history.

New Labour therefore acceded to power in 1997 on the back of a manifesto underscoring the party’s modern left-of-centre credentials as well as its internationalist heritage. It set itself up, indeed, as ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’ (Labour Party 1997). However, while it pledged to represent the British people, New Labour wanted in fact to prompt those same people to reconsider the meaning of the nation’s history, in order to help the party build a government-led consensus around a more positively inclined European dimension to British foreign policy. New Labour, it seems, wanted to represent a different sort of Britain, a different kind of British people. Far from Britain being eternally cut off from the continent – or opposed to it – it was suggested, Britain had always and ever been a European country, and the moment had arrived to recognize this. Economic, political and cultural interdependence between countries, which Blair identified as ‘the characteristic of the modern world’ (Blair 2006e), had, he explained, been accelerating for hundreds of years. Given modern mass communication, the British simply noticed their interconnectedness more now than in previous decades and should act accordingly. In New Labour’s rendering, therefore, British history could easily be told as part of the European story rather than as the ‘island story’ beloved by nationalist Eurosceptics. This book is about the clash between those alternative visions of the British past, present and future. As New Labour had it, British history pointed towards Europe; in the Eurosceptics’ logic, it pointed away from Europe.

To set the scene for what follows in the study, this introduction is split into four main sections. The first argues that, in attempting to devise a successful propaganda offensive, the New Labour government was on the back foot from the beginning, such was the appeal of the Britain-as-separate-from-Europe conception of the national past. The second details why I take the potentially controversial stance that British European policy under New Labour is a case where the government failed to achieve its objectives. This is certainly not the line that Blair and Brown would take, so it is worth justifying the basic premise of the study in detail. The third part surveys the literature which tries to explain the apparent failure by New Labour to leave a positive, Europeanist legacy to British European policy. It begins with a minority of writers who are kind to Blair and Brown by arguing that they transformed Britain’s relations with the EU after 1997, until the Iraq invasion blew apart the EU–US bridge New Labour had carefully constructed. It moves on to those writers who are highly critical, seeing no real European strategy at all on the government’s part. It ends by studying the biggest group, that is, of ‘mid-range’ commentators, critical of the ways in which the supposedly principled question of Europe was subordinated to pragmatic electoral concerns and domestic party positioning. My book sits most easily with the last group, albeit for quite different reasons from those conventionally offered up by this school of interpretation. The last main part of the chapter explains why this study tells the story of New Labour’s European policy through political speeches, arguing that studying the language of policy allows us to see into Blair and Brown’s minds at work as they fought – sometimes with each other – to develop a policy strategy that was simultaneously ‘European’ enough to satisfy their personal agendas and their party’s ambitions for Britain, but not so challenging that it might risk alienating the ‘middle England’ voters who had been so helpful in bringing them to power in 1997. Uppermost in Blair and Brown’s minds was the need to appease, or keep on side, a huge swathe of voters who might have voted for New Labour but who were not necessarily signed up to the idea of ‘New Britain’. A final section of this introduction then outlines the argument and structure of the remainder of the study.

I. An ambiguous offensive

Between July and December 2008 France held the Presidency of the Council of the EU. Along with an ambitious work programme across the EU policy agenda (French Presidency 2008), the French government decided to mark the occasion very visibly and in glorious technicolour by lighting up the north side of the Eiffel Tower and adorning it with the yellow stars of the EU flag (image 1). Every evening for two months from 30 June 2008 this physical monument to France and the French people proudly glowed blue, the circle of stars reflecting back at it off the river Seine. This was not the first time the Tower had been lit differently from its usual orange-gold to mark a big national occasion. The new millennium, the Chinese New Year in 2004 and the country’s hosting of the Rugby World Cup in 2007 all saw the Tower coloured in celebration. Nor was it the first time the Tower had been used to give physical expression to France’s Europeanism. On 9 May 2006 the Eiffel Tower was lit blue to mark the twentieth celebration of ‘Europe Day’, albeit without the innovation of the yellow stars included for the Presidency (Reuters 2008). It is instructive to compare the easy public embrace of the idea of Europe in France with the difficult, less accommodating approach to the EU prevalent in many areas of British political, media and public life. In Britain, the symbolism of the EU as represented in its flag and the mock ‘national’ anthem is routinely derided for hubristically portending the emergence of a ‘superstate’ that unstitches the fabric of life and traditions in sovereign member states (Adams 2008; Chapman 2009; National Policy Institute 2009).

Image 1. Eiffel Tower during the French Presidency of the EU, 2008.

One manifestation of this approach that sees a European identity as being antithetical or opposed to a notional British identity* is how the EU flag is transposed onto famous British national symbols of governance and statehood in press articles warning against the dangers of further British integration into the EU. For example, image 2 shows a mocked up photo of the House of Commons that appeared alongside an article from the popular British tabloid newspaper the Sun in September 2007 entitled ‘No to a United States of Europe’, in which its political editor, George Pascoe-Watson, judged that: ‘The new European Constitution threatens to transform virtually every aspect of British life for ever’ – none of it for the better. The accompanying image of EU flags fluttering over the Palace of Westminster, the seat of Parliament, graphically illustrated his contention that ‘Brussels is relentlessly bolstering its control over Britain and the rest of Europe’. Any such European entanglement would detract from Britain’s parliamentary and judicial sovereignty because power under the Lisbon Treaty would flow from Britain to the EU institutions in Belgium (Pascoe-Watson 2007). The picture could just as easily have shown the EU flag flying over the Queen’s official residence down the Mall at Buckingham Palace or twelve yellow stars circling the face of Big Ben and the point about the British in Europe would have been the same. Where French national identity seems indissoluble from its identity as a European country, Britain’s status as a European country is hotly contested. In France as in Britain there is opposition to the EU across the political spectrum and in the country at large (Flood 1995). This resistance reached new levels during the 1990s, when it crystallized around the debates surrounding the Treaty of Maastricht in the early to middle years of the decade (Benoit 1997) and culminated in the ‘non’ in the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Britain appears, however, to suffer many more agonized contortions than France about its status as part of the European family of nations, where zero-sum identity constructions take ‘more Europe’ to mean ‘less Britain’. The juxtaposition of images 1 and 2 makes this abundantly clear. In France there is a broad consensus that the country is already and inextricably in Europe, is European – the yellow stars on the blue Eiffel Tower are a reality – whereas there is less than total assent in Britain that it is a European country by virtue of either its geography or its history. Pictures of EU flags hovering over the Houses of Parliament seem to imply that Britain is not European yet; it will become so only if the government connives to sign up to integrationist measures such as the Lisbon Treaty. The message is a simple one: Britain is not European.

Image 2. ‘We told EU so’, Sun, 23 September 2007, p. 4.

Pascoe-Watson’s visceral opposition to the EU was never welcomed by Tony Blair, who resigned from office in June 2007 having spent a decade trying to improve the image of the EU in the eyes of the British media and public. Supposedly the most Europhile Prime Minister Britain had had since Edward Heath, the Prime Minister responsible for taking the country into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, Blair was explicit about the place Europe occupied in his foreign policy strategy from the moment he took office. He had already sketched the contours of his approach two years before, in a speech on ‘Britain in Europe’ at the London think-tank Chatham House (covered in Scott 2004: 207–12; and reprinted in Blair 1996: 280–7). The ideas set out in this speech crucially moulded his European thought and pronouncements in office, particularly as far as his concepts of patriotism, self-confidence and ‘constructive engagement’ went, as well as his understanding of the meaning of the national past. During his victory speech outside Downing Street on 2 May 1997, the newly elected Prime Minister began by talking about the improvements he wanted to make to the country’s education system, its National Health Service (NHS) and its overall economic performance, all staples of the preceding election campaign. Foreign policy received only cursory, yet telling, attention: ‘it shall be a government, too, that gives this country strength and confidence in leadership both at home and abroad, particularly in respect of Europe’ (Blair 1997b). This was a classic statement of Blair’s foreign policy agenda, for two reasons. First, he sought to demonstrate that the national interest would be safe in Labour’s hands through his stress on continuity with past approaches. Incoming Prime Ministers always pledge to strengthen Britain’s standing and status in the world and the majority of Blair’s words were given over to reinforcing that agenda. Second, however, we see some distinctive Blair in the last phrase, ‘particularly in respect of Europe’, which need not have been included to help that sentence resonate with the public. Blair’s refrain from first to last was that he wanted to build a ‘young country’ in his own image and, maybe influenced by some fond early memories of growing up in Australia, he clearly valued the participation of ‘confident, outward bound, and “up for it”’ types of people to help him achieve this (Blair 2006c). Becoming closer to Europe was the means by which he sought to modernize Britain. Why did he not go down the easier route of saying he would enhance the ‘special relationship’, or strengthen the United Nations (UN), or pledge to tackle global poverty, or bring about peace in the Middle East? Those final words on foreign policy, ‘particularly in respect of Europe’, were no doubt pored over and then included for a reason. They reflected Blair’s desire to make lasting and positive changes not just to British policy in Europe but also to the way the country as a whole – not just an already Europeanized diplomatic elite – related to Europe. As Sally Morgan, a close adviser to Blair, has reflected, in 1997, before Blair had developed any ideas about liberal interventionism or confronting terrorists, dictators or poverty around the globe, ‘a commitment to the EU was a strong tenet of New Labour, in the formation of it; it was one of the pillars … that was there from the beginning’ (interview with Morgan).

This unequivocal opening gambit masked a sobering reality for the Europeanists who might have been tempted to construe Blair’s time in Number 10 as heralding a new dawn in British European policy, for two reasons. The first harbinger of doom was that Blair’s thinking on Europe was not yet fully formed or particularly substantive at this stage, if it ever became so. As one Blair biographer has put it, ‘Blair’s thinking about the EU … lacked the long pedigree of visceral commitment of the true Europhile. His position was pragmatic and opportunistic – as was much of his thinking’ (Seldon 2005: 316). According to this interpretation it is too simplistic to read ‘Blair’ for ‘Heath’, whatever the apparent similarities in their European rhetoric or professed ambitions. On general election day Blair put Europe at the centre of his project for national renewal, but he had spent the previous month making more than the odd comment that resonated with the opinion of the very sceptics he would have to confront once in government. Casting doubt on whether the single currency would even work, cautioning that it might not be in British interests to join and affecting sentiment for the image of the Queen’s head on the pound, Blair’s electoral strategy culminated in him declaring in the Sun on 22 April 1997, ‘I will have no truck with a European superstate. If there are moves to create that dragon I will slay it’ (Blair 1997a). We return to Blair’s pre-election Euroscepticism in chapter 7 but a few remarks on it are in order here. Summing up on Blair’s apparently ‘jingoistic’ stance before polling day (Seldon 2005: 317), Andrew Rawnsley has pointed out that he was ‘talking the language of Europhobia to win an election, but nothing had been surrendered in policy’ (Rawnsley 2001: 73). Rawnsley’s argument is that we can ignore the language and judge Blair by the substance of his policy on Europe, which was more positive than his naked electioneering rhetoric would suggest. That may be so, but it rather depends on how we judge the policy and it was far from clear even in 1997 what that policy would be, who would be leading it and what impact it would or could have on British public opinion.

This feeds into the second reason why Europhiles might justifiably have been wary of Blair’s Europeanism on the steps of Downing Street in 1997. As central as he was, Blair was by no means the only player in the making or execution of New Labour’s European policy. When Rawnsley argued that nothing had been surrendered in policy terms, he overlooked some critical countervailing forces working against Blair being able to put a Europe-centred foreign policy into action after 1997. Mostly, these forces coalesced around the figure of Gordon Brown. The Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout Blair’s time as Prime Minister looms large in any discussion of Blair’s policies, character, opinions, leadership style and manner of taking decisions. If that is true of the New Labour years in general then it is most acutely seen in the conduct of its European policy. It is open to question whether Brown had the same level of passion as Blair did for Britain playing a greater part in the EU – not least economically – yet it is too simplistic to say that the Prime Minister was ‘pro’ while the Chancellor was ‘anti’ (following Seldon 2005: 666). It is perhaps fairer to suggest that neither the Chancellor, his close advisers such as Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan nor large swathes of the Treasury team they headed were convinced about the economic merits of Britain joining the single currency. In fact, as Robert Peston, a close observer of Brown, has remarked, ‘innate mistrust of our friends in Europe … has been a characteristic of the Treasury for decades’ (Peston 2005: 179). Establishment Britain still shuddered at the memory of the damage done to the reputation and image of John Major’s Conservative government when sterling was forced unceremoniously out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism during ‘Black Wednesday’ in September 1992 (detailed in Stephens 1997: 226–62). After that episode, notes Simon Jenkins, ‘Division over Europe, magnified in the press, dogged [Major’s] every step’ (Jenkins 2007: 162; for a quantitative study of the extent of the Conservative Party’s ‘rebellion’ over Europe see Berrington and Hague 1998). The Treasury (and many a British politician) learnt a harsh lesson that day about the potential dangers of British entanglement in the EU’s schemes for closer economic integration. It is also noteworthy that, as shadow Chancellor at the time, Brown had supported the government’s decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (Bower 2007: 74–5, 77, 96; O’Donnell and Whitman 2007: 268). While the single currency might not have been ‘real’ in 1997 it was the most pressing concern facing policy-makers in Britain and on the continent. Its name had been agreed upon in 1995, the conditions of the Stability and Growth Pact were in place, and Brussels institutions were legislating on its introduction and deliberating how the economics of the new currency would be managed by the European Central Bank. By May 1998 – exactly one year after New Labour came to power – decisions had to be taken on which countries would join in the first wave of euro entrants in January 1999 (BBC 1997). An economic move with clear political implications, the euro was to dog New Labour’s early attempts to generate a Europeanist consensus within Whitehall, let alone in the country at large. While Blair was convinced of the political case for joining the euro, but not so much so that he would risk a major split within government over the issue, Brown and his Treasury team were firmly of the opposite mind. The Treasury worried that the British economy could be unduly harmed by another false move in economic integration, while Brown calculated that it was a risk to the credibility of the government to be involved in a potentially damaging economic adventure in Europe. Effectively handing control over the economic agenda to Brown and the Treasury meant Blair was always going to be on the back foot over the creation of a positive European policy in which British membership of the single currency was the central plank.

It would always be difficult for Blair or Brown to put Britain at the ‘heart’ of Euro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Lists of images, figures, boxes and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Context I. The New Labour project
• 3 Context II. Discourse and norm entrepreneurship
• 4 Interests rate: economics, influence and security
• 5 Context III. A permanent state of discursive war
• 6 Identities: New Labour and the Eurosceptics
• 7 Context IV. New Labour, old history
• 8 Escaping the past?
• 9 Projecting an image: New Labour, the EU and the wider world
• 10 Conclusion
• Epilogue. New Labour after Blair: British European discourses 2007–10
• Appendix 1. Coding scheme
• Appendix 2. A coded speech
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes