Blair in stalemate at the EU

Europe's foreign ministers met this week ahead of next weekend's EU summit to set the Budget for 2007-2013. As Britain currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, the leaders' meeting will be chaired by Tony Blair.

But if this week's wrangling is anything to go by, the prospects for agreement on the next Budget look slim, said David Rennie in The Daily Telegraph.

In an effort to broker an agreement before it loses the presidency at the end of the month, Britain has offered to cut £800m a year from its controversial rebate ie, to pay a total of £5.6bn extra over seven years on condition there's a review of all spending, including the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), in 2008. The response from Jacques Chirac was blunt: it's not enough cash and (as agreed in 2002) we're not touching the CAP until 2013.

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Blair's caught in a classic bind that's partly of his own making, said the FT. At home, he's faced with screaming headlines about "caving in" over Britain's cherished Budget rebate. In Europe, where his proposals would trim spending in the new eastern Europe member states, he's accused of robbing the poor to pay the rich.

The PM is guilty of bad communication and poor politics. In truth, he is not abandoning Britain's rebate; it has always been perfectly clear that the UK cannot plausibly demand its money back on the costs of EU enlargement, and nor should it.

The problem is that Blair has "never made that very clear back home". Instead, he has tried to imply that cuts in the UK rebate must be linked to reform of the CAP when he knows that is not going to happen until the present, painfully negotiated settlement runs out in 2013.

It's a negotiating mess that might yet break down completely and Blair, who has once again failed to make the case for Britain in Europe, must be prepared to take the blame.