BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 83
battles still to come, that there was going to be a battle over putting the
IRA out of business’, he would say later: ‘But for me on 10 April 1998
having an agreement – yes, with that battle still to fight – was much better
than having no agreement, and the world blaming me for there not being
one.’11
The price of international approbation, however, was disillusionment
and increasing vulnerability on the home front. In failing to resolve the
issue with Blair in the week of the Good Friday negotiation, Trimble left
an enormous hostage to Paisley’s subsequent electoral good fortune.
Unbelievably, too, in neglecting to stipulate republican support for the
PSNI as the price of participation in government, Trimble also left Paisley
a trump card to play in the 2006 St Andrews negotiations leading to the
2007 settlement between the DUP and Sinn Fein.
Reg Empey, who succeeded Trimble after the party’s rout in the 2005
general election, would frequently complain that they had done all the
‘heavy lifting’, making the task easier in turn for Paisley’s DUP. And as the
19 Frank Millar, David Trimble: The Price of Peace (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2004), pp. 101–4.
10 Ibid., ch. 3, ‘Guns and Government’.
11 Ibid., p. 76.
so-called ‘extremes’ themselves began converging on the centre ground,
some veterans of the process would reflect that there had perhaps been
something almost inevitable about the eclipse of the moderate Ulster
Unionists and the SDLP.
However, Blair could see no inevitably happy outcome in November
2003 when he realised, too late, that he had trusted to Trimble’s luck
holding once too often. Trimble would subsequently admit that ‘hubris’
led him to think he could negotiate a better deal with Adams in the late
summer of 2003 than Blair and Ahern had managed.12 And he would
compound his internal difficulties with an extraordinarily ill-considered
attempt to expel Donaldson and two other dissident MPs from his parliamentary party. In such circumstances the UUP leader did astoundingly
well to trail Paisley’s DUP by just three seats when the 2003 Assembly
election count was completed. However Donaldson’s prompt defection
to the DUP along with two colleagues instantly transformed Paisley’s
margin of advantage – one that would see the DUP take nine Westminster
seats in the ensuing general election while Trimble lost his own and saw
his party reduced to one seat in the new House of Commons.
Blair was downcast, and took time to convince that there was the
remotest possibility of rebuilding the essential architecture of the Belfast
Agreement during Paisley’s reign as undisputed leader of Ulster’s unionists. In invoking ‘history’, the Prime Minister had risked its cruel rebuke.
After all, equally great if not greater men and women than him had
sought to end centuries of conflict in and about Ireland. It would also be
entirely in character that Paisley – the self-styled ‘Dr No’ of unionist politics – might think to see Blair off, as he had done Wilson, Heath,
Callaghan, Thatcher and Major before him.
‘History’, its hand and its challenge, would be invoked again and again
through the tortuous and interminable negotiations that followed in
Downing Street, Lancaster House and Leeds Castle. However, when the
putative ‘Comprehensive Agreement’ failed in December 2004 – again on
the issue of verifiable IRA decommissioning, and after Paisley demanded
republicans wear ‘sackcloth and ashes’ in token of their repentance – that
call to history came to be regarded as devalued currency in a process that
began to look like an end in itself. Within days of that attempt, police in
both states were blaming the IRA for the £26.5 million Northern Bank
robbery. And by the time President Bush snubbed Adams in favour of
the sisters of murdered Belfast man Robert McCartney at the annual
12 Ibid., p. 172.
:
St Patrick’s Day festivities in Washington the following March, the wheels
looked finally to have come off the peace train.
Amazingly, though, Blair’s own luck was to hold, and suddenly it
seemed he would not be denied the prize after all. It would not be until
January 2007 that it became clear that Paisley had overruled the strong
instinct of some of his closest colleagues to deny Blair and ‘wait for
Gordon’ Brown before concluding a settlement. By that stage, however, a
most unlikely relationship had developed between the two men. There
would be suggestions that they liked to discuss theology, although – with
Blair reportedly contemplating conversion to Rome – it would seem
likely that speculation along these lines was overheated. Yet the famous
Blair ‘empathy’ was undoubtedly once more in play. And the Prime
Minister grew convinced that Paisley sensed the time right for a settlement provided Sinn Fein met his terms on decommissioning, and, crucially, agreed to ‘cross the Rubicon’ and finally accept the legitimacy of the
Northern Ireland state by fully endorsing the police. Blair was lucky also
in that, while fast approaching his own ‘sell by’ date, he found himself
dealing with an ageing DUP leader also in something of a hurry to secure
a more satisfactory ‘legacy’.
So the world watched in disbelief as television beamed the remarkable
images of Paisley and Adams sitting down together at Stormont on 26
March 2007 to seal their very own DUP/Sinn Fein agreement. And there
would be tears again too, this time in the Republic a week later, as Dr
Paisley shook hands with Taoiseach Ahern and declared a new era in relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Thus Blair’s Irish ‘legacy’ was secured at the last gasp. And many of
those who played their part along the way would testify to the Prime
Minister’s heroic role, time and again citing his extraordinary tenacity
and commitment. Yet, about a man never knowingly undersold by the
Downing Street spin-doctors, such descriptions themselves suddenly
appeared to err on the side of historic understatement.
Introducing the honoured guest to address both Houses of Parliament
in the Royal Gallery at Westminster on 15 May 2007, Blair was equally
clear that he could not have done it without Taoiseach Ahern. And rightly
so. Various ‘solutions’ had been tried before, each assuring unionists that
the principle of ‘consent’ was sacrosanct, and all of them invalidated in
unionist eyes by the Republic’s territorial claim to Northern Ireland. Had
Ahern not amended Articles 2 and 3 of his country’s Constitution, there
would have been no engagement with Trimble, no Belfast Agreement, and
certainly no Paisley goodwill trip to Dublin.
During the final stages of the 2007 negotiations Peter Hain, who had
succeeded John Reid at the Northern Ireland Office, specifically warned
the DUP they could not count on anything like the same level of commitment or interest fr
om any alternative Labour Prime Minister. With Blair’s
departure and Labour’s leadership election hovering into view, the specific message was that Prime Minister Gordon Brown would have more
compelling priorities before attempting to win a fourth term in office.
Some close to Paisley suspected an element of bluff. Interestingly,
however, they decided not to call it, and they were probably wise. Of
course, Brown would not have rejected a peace deal early on his watch.
However, the ever present risk, frequently cited by Ahern in particular,
was of ‘events’ – whether planned by ‘dissident’ republicans or others –
that might see the process derailed. Mandelson might strike a chord when
he complained that for Blair at times the ‘process’ was indeed everything,
its maintenance if not forward movement necessary if only to ensure
things did not slip back.13 Yet after the extraordinary events of May 2007,
who would say that Blair had been wrong?
Right and wrong
Was there a moral dimension to making peace? And did Blair – ‘a guy
with a moral dimension to everything’ – observe it? The Prime Minister
would retire to worldwide acclaim for bringing people and parties not
always famed for being on the side of ‘good’ to a new, common and peaceful purpose. So many would find it surprising that, by this writing,
former Deputy First Minister Mallon should have emerged as Blair’s
sharpest critic – openly suggesting that the Prime Minister was ‘amoral’
in his political dealings and ‘didn’t know the meaning of the word
“honesty” ’.14
Downing Street was dismissive when Mandelson accused Blair of at
times ‘conceding and capitulating’ to republicans. But they were surely
stung when Mallon, in the same newspaper series, described Blair as a
man who would ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ anyone, while accusing London and
Dublin of deliberately disposing of the ‘centre parties’ in favour of ‘the
extremes’ represented by the DUP and Sinn Fein. ‘It was strategy’,
Mallon would insist: ‘You had people like Jonathan Powell and others in
Dublin who had decided that to make this work you had to dispense with
13 Peter Mandelson interview, The Guardian, 13 March 2007.
14 Seamus Mallon interview, The Guardian, 14 March 2007.
:
middle unionism and middle nationalism. I think it was as calculated
as that.’
The inevitable retort would be ‘sour grapes’ on the part of Mallon, who
had failed, after all, along with First Minister Trimble, to ‘make it work’
and thus preserve the moderate centre. While admitting the question also
in his own mind, the impact of Mallon’s charge would be lessened by
Trimble’s belief that ‘Blair was probably the last one to buy into the NIO
view that this [DUP/Sinn Fein ascendancy] had to happen’.15
Mallon’s contention is that Blair betrayed Trimble by allowing the fateful
2003 Assembly election to proceed despite the failure of General John De
Chastelain, head of the Independent International Decommissioning
Commission, to report on IRA disarmament with the detail and transparency demanded by Trimble and deemed necessary for his political
survival.
In fairness to Blair, Trimble recalls that SDLP leader Mark Durkan was
with the Irish and the Americans in pressing Blair that the election,
already twice postponed by London, must proceed. Trimble’s natural
temptation to conclude that perhaps he was ‘sold short’ by Blair is also
tempered by his experience that – on the issue of decommissioning – the
SDLP had invariably sided with Sinn Fein against him.
That said, Trimble would share the underlying concern reflected by
Mallon, and by Durkan, before the 2007 Assembly elections, when he
asked: ‘Can the parties that gave us the worst of our past [Sinn Fein and
the DUP] give us the best of our future?’
Admirers of ‘realpolitik’ would rightly dismiss complaints about the
verdict ultimately delivered by the electorate. And they would draw comforting signs from the early days of the new Stormont administration that
the DUP and Sinn Fein might actually make a better job of working the
partnership arrangement than the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP had
managed.
However, the Durkan question would find a resonance among many
people who genuinely wished to see the new power-sharing venture
succeed. It would be attended by continuing and legitimate questioning
as to whether it had been necessary for Blair to lose the two parties – the
UUP and SDLP – seen to protect and defend politics through more than
thirty years of assault by republican violence and DUP sectarianism
and intransigence. Many close observers would remain convinced that
Sinn Fein had played a deliberately ‘long peace’ in pursuit of its goal to
15 David Trimble, interview by author, 22 May 2007.
supplant the SDLP in preparation for a bid for power in the Irish
Republic, which failed badly in the May 2007 Irish election. Had Prime
Minister Blair been too indulgent of a republican leadership plainly
seeking a way out of violence while maximising its leverage through continual internal ‘management’ problems? And specifically – following the
‘9/11’ outrages in America, said by Blair and Bush to have changed the
global climate in relation to terrorism and its toleration – should Blair
have demanded better, tougher terms, and earlier, from a republican
leadership for whom there really was now no going ‘back to war’?
Looking forward rather than back, there will be uneasy, still-to-beanswered questions too about the ‘character’ of Northern Ireland’s new
political elite. Having seized power, will the DUP and Sinn Fein prove
capable of genuinely ‘sharing’ it for the common good? Can commitments to justice and equality have meaning without a shared commitment to reconciliation between communities still living a segregated,
‘apartheid’ existence behind the so-called ‘peace walls’? Will declared
republican support for the police be reflected in the cultivation of a
culture of lawfulness and the breaking of paramilitary control on both
sides? Crucially, will devolution provide a settlement finally permitting
the development – never before experienced – of a common commitment to a place called ‘Northern Ireland’? And, while plainly desired by
unionists, how would that sit with Sinn Fein’s insistence still on ‘process’
and ‘transition’ leading to Irish unity?
Questions. Blair’s great promise to the people of Northern Ireland was
that, henceforth, they would be explored and addressed in conditions of
peace and with a commitment on all sides to purely peaceful and democratic means. In delivering that transformation, this British Prime
Minister really did make history in Ireland. Even he, of course, could not
have thought to end it.
24
Europe
Introduction
Labour assumed office in May 1997 amidst expectatio
ns that there would
be significant improvements in Britain’s relations with the European
Union (EU). These expectations were based on the Conservatives’ record
on the one hand and Labour’s promises on the other. Expectations that
Britain’s relations with the EU would change under Labour were held as
strongly on the Continent as they were at home.
This chapter evaluates Labour’s record on Europe under Blair and
argues that the net effect of government policy on British–EU relations
was more substantive than is often credited.1 A key reason why the record
has been underestimated is that throughout Blair’s premiership the
loudest voices came from, on the one hand, that (very considerable) part
of the media which disapproved of Blair’s EU policies because he was too
pro-European for their tastes and, on the other hand, a relatively small
band of strong pro-Europeans who believed that Blair had betrayed
them – most particularly by not attempting to join the single currency. A
second important reason for the underestimation of the record is that
from 2003 ‘Europe’, along with most other policy issues, was crowded out
by the overwhelming focus on Iraq.2
Generally, Europe is only to the fore when sovereignty concerns are
at stake and/or when Britain is seen to be engaged in confrontational,
11 Strictly speaking, ‘Europe’ is not, of course, completely synonymous with ‘the EU’.
However, in common parlance, and so in this chapter too, they are treated as if they were
interchangeable.
12 The scale of the dominance of the Iraq issue is indicated by a BPIX online survey of 2304
adults, conducted between 16–19 March 2007, the results of which were published in The
Observer, on 8 April. 58% identified ‘The war in Iraq’ as Blair’s biggest failure. The next
largest perceived failure was the widening gap between rich and poor, which was identified
by 10%. Only 1% identified ‘Failure to encourage greater integration in the European
Union’ as Blair’s biggest failure.
high-level, and high-profile exchanges with other member states. These
conditions applied on several occasions during the Blair years – most