BRITAIN: Prime minister Tony Blair has told MPs failure to secure the EU budget deal at the weekend would have been "a betrayal" of everything Britain had stood for since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In a robust defence of his conduct of the Brussels negotiations, Mr Blair said the UK could be proud of the role it had played in the enlargement of the EU from 15 to 25 member states. And he suggested the central and eastern European countries who would be the beneficiaries of the new budget deal would in turn be Britain's allies in the "major battle" he admitted lay ahead over reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap).
"To have championed the cause of these new states; to have welcomed them into Nato and Europe and then to have refused to agree a budget that protects their future economic development would have been a betrayal of everything Britain has rightly stood for in the past 15 years or more since the fall of the Berlin Wall," the prime minister declared: "They are our allies. It is our duty to stand by them. But it is also massively in our interest."
In their first clash on the question of Europe, the new Conservative leader David Cameron claimed Mr Blair had failed in all three of his declared objectives for the British presidency - to limit the budget, ensure fundamental reform of the Cap, and keep the British rebate.
"Then the prime minister changed his mind," he charged, before demanding: "Why did you give up £7 billion for next to nothing? How is the chancellor going to pay for it: more taxes, more borrowing or cuts in spending?"
Through subsequent interventions, including from the DUP's Nigel Dodds, Mr Blair noticeably failed to reply directly to questions about the spending implications of what the North Belfast MP called "his largesse in Brussels."
Instead he turned the attack on the Tories, telling them "enlargement was never and could never be a cost-free option", mocking Mr Cameron's proposal to withdraw Tory MEPs from the centre-right European Peoples' Party and declaring Tory Euro-scepticism "alive and well" under Mr Cameron's leadership.
To Labour cheers, Mr Blair told Mr Cameron he had secured all his objectives. In net terms Britain would be contributing 63 per cent more in the next financial period compared to 124 per cent in the case of France.
Claiming to have "achieved parity for the first time," Mr Blair told Mr Cameron: "The rebate is rising, not falling. France is getting a bigger net contribution loss than Britain . . . You support enlargement, right? Yes? You support wealthy countries paying for the poorer countries? That is right, isn't it? But you do not support Britain paying any money for it. You talk about a crisis in the European Union. What sort of crisis would there be if you were in charge, with that policy?"
Mr Blair then delighted Labour MPs, telling Mr Cameron his policy of withdrawing the Tories from the EPP would leave his members in the European Parliament sitting alongside Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini, and "worst of all" Robert Kilroy-Silk.
Reuters adds: European Commission president José Manuel Barroso pledged yesterday there would be no taboos in a wide-ranging review of the EU budget in 2008/9. Mr Barroso said the weekend deal covering the budget from 2007 to 2013 meant the review could yield changes in spending priorities during that same period - provided all member states agree.
"What we need to be doing is to have an overall revision of our entire budget, looking at it without restrictions or taboos," he said, stressing that Europe had avoided paralysis and was on the move again. That review would include study of "the Common Agricultural Policy of course, and the British rebate certainly".