June 24, 2007	Sunday	Jamadi-us-Sani 08, 1428

BRUSSELS: There was no big public show of affection and no sign of any presents for British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his final European Union summit.

The man who once had high hopes of putting Britain at the heart of Europe bowed out on the defensive on Saturday after 10 years attending EU summits, with Euro-scepticism still as strong as ever in Britain.

Blair, who hands over power next week to finance minister Gordon Brown, arrived even at this week’s EU summit in a somewhat isolated position – saying he would sign up to a new treaty to reform the EU only if his partners met a set of British demands.

“We have led the way on economic reform, on defence policy, on enlargement,” Blair told reporters after the summit as he looked back on his decade as prime minister.

There were some fond farewells.

New French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he regretted the departure of the man he might have done business with. “He was someone who sought consensus in Europe,” Sarkozy said.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Blair deserved a very positive legacy. “Tony Blair has contributed in a very valuable way to European cooperation...he’s really a pro-European,” he said.

Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said: “I think that Tony did a good job. It was not easy for him at home to defend Europe and he did it. I have always experienced him as maybe the most pro-European politician in the United Kingdom.”

But Blair has not killed off Euro-scepticism in Britain.

Mass-circulation newspapers warned Blair against conceding more powers to Brussels at the summit, with The Sun newspaper last week launching a “Seven days to save Britain” campaign.

The opposition Conservatives wasted no time calling for a referendum, saying the new reform treaty simply repackaged large parts of the EU Constitution rejected by Dutch and French voters in 2005. That leaves a political headache for Blair’s successor.

Some politicians believe Blair should have done more to persuade Britons of the benefits of membership of the EU, which Britain joined in 1973.

“I think he ought to have campaigned for the things he believes in. He believes in the EU, he believes in integration, but he hasn’t had the wherewithal to put that across to the British people,” Andrew Duff, a federalist Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament, told Reuters at the summit.

The EU is Britain’s main trading partner and many Britons own second homes in other European countries, but suspicion of Brussels and European political integration remain high.

Newspapers often portray British traditions as being under threat because of EU rules.

Hugo Brady, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think-tank, said Blair once seemed the man who would tackle anti-EU prejudice in Britain.

“But the (political) capital he might have been able to spend (on Europe) was spent on promoting the Iraq war. Once that was done, he had neither the political capital nor the trust of the public left to enter into such a debate,” he said.

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused a deep rift in Europe between countries such as Britain that supported it and those such as France and Germany which opposed it.

However, Brady said Blair’s Britain had won a lot of policy arguments in the EU, had had a constructive say in EU justice and defence policies and had advanced a liberal economic agenda.

Blair is by no means the first British prime minister to find Europe a thorny issue. His predecessor John Major also started out promising to put Britain at the heart of Europe but his government was fatally damaged by the pound’s ejection from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

Blair at one stage spoke in favour of British membership of the European single currency. But Brown later put the euro question on the backburner by ruling the five economic tests he had set for membership had not been not met.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said Blair had failed – as had the Swedish government – to bring his country into the euro.

“Britain is always an important actor when it comes to foreign and security affairs. Whether they could be even more engaged on the European scene? Yes I think they could,” he said.

Now Brown gets his chance to chart Britain’s destiny on the European stage. Some EU diplomats fear Brown will be less keen on European cooperation than Blair was.

But Brady said Brown’s perceived coolness to Europe may act to his advantage.

“I think that Gordon Brown is the man to make an historic rapprochement between British public opinion and the EU because his instincts on this are more representative of British people in general and perhaps they’ll evolve together,” he said.—Reuters