1 - The British left for market Europe

Summary

In March 1998, Tony Blair gave the first-ever speech by a British prime minister to the French National Assembly. This coincided with the UK beginning its sixmonth rotating EU Council presidency. He delivered the speech in immaculate French to a parliament dominated by a Socialist Party sceptical of New Labour's market-friendly direction of travel. Blair emphasized the importance of “global political engagement” and insisted it was about more than simply “commercial exchange”, encompassing all areas of legal, social and cultural life. The “cohabitation” of French people living in Britain (and vice versa), he argued, was a great success worth celebrating. He remarked that his “neither laissez-faire nor rigidly statist” Third Way project sought to reconcile the supposed contradictions between free enterprise and competition, on the one hand, and social action and poverty reduction, on the other, in a world of rapid and inevitable economic and social change. He also came to “dispel any doubts” that the UK would be anything other than “a full partner of Europe”. Noting the country's absence from monetary union, he carefully suggested that the door remained open to joining in the future. He also discussed how fears of distant institutions and dilution of national identity drive Euroscepticism, arguing that purposeful reform and striking a balance between supranationalism and nationalism could ward them off by ensuring “integration, when justified; diversity permitted by subsidiarity, when not” (Blair 1998).

This represented a vision for Europe and, crucially, for Britain in Europe. At the time, it seemed like a watershed domestically. The battles that had disfigured and, when combined with Black Wednesday (see Keegan, Marsh & Roberts 2017), ultimately destroyed John Major's Conservative government over Maastricht just five years earlier appeared to be from an entirely different era. Blair's young, modern, metropolitan party wore its pro-European sympathies comfortably. It had changed the terms of debate decisively since coming to power with an enormous majority. From signing a Social Chapter that Major had resisted, to laying the groundwork for potential membership of the single currency, it was difficult to envisage anything other than the gradual intensification of meaningful UK participation in EU affairs. But what agenda would be pursued via that engagement?