Brown bows to Blair (again) but Nick says “naff off”
“Get in” as they say on the football terraces.
The BBC reports today that Gordon Brown has finally admitted defeat – and – presumably through gritted teeth, let it be known that he will actively lobby for his predecessor Tony Blair to be named the first president of the European Council.
In the same report it is said that later today (Wednesday) Nick Clegg will publicly declare his opposition to Blair’s appointment. I hope so. Tony Blair, is, afterall, not yet cleared of war crimes. He orchestrated what most of us recognise as an illegal war against Iraq. A war that the Lib Dems single-handedly opposed when the Labour party, the Conservative party, large chunks of the media and a significant proportion of the British population (no doubt as a result of the above) thought was “a good thing”.
Nick – sing it loud and sing it clear. Until there has been an honest and open public investigation into the events surrounding the war on Iraq (i.e not the current one), a suspected war criminal - who went at odds with the rest of Europe on the matter – can’t surely be eligible for this post – no matter what ones feelings are on Europe more generally.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:13 am
The other reason to oppose Blair is the suspicion that he would want to make the post into a presidency with independent influence, but as it stands there is no democratic mandate for a post with wider-ranging influence or power. We need a dull, boring, grey technocrat from a small Continental country to set the tone for the post as the council chairmanship that it is (so we are told) intended to be. It’s true that politically, Blair would not be as damaging as, say, Sarkozy or (ha!) Berlusconi, since he is (relative to the rest of the EU) pro-market and Atlanticist, but I’d be willing to bet that he would try to make the post carry more weight than its appointment structure should really allow. I prefer a powerless chairman over a charismatic president any day.