EU: The hardest part of the task facing EU supporters, particularly in Britain, was to explain its continuing relevance to ordinary people, a former Downing Street adviser said in Dublin yesterday.
Sir Stephen Wall, a former British ambassador to the EU and adviser to various British prime ministers, who now advises the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, was speaking at the Institute of European Affairs on "Britain and the Constitutional Treaty".
Sir Stephen said the challenge was "to explain to people what it is about the EU that makes it unique and what it is about it that continues to be relevant".
While the "no more war" argument for European unity resonated with him personally, "for most voters now, that's ancient history".
The single market was "taken for granted". The "biggest single achievement" of the EU - enlargement - was more often seen as a threat.
"The French leadership failed to make the case for enlargement," he said.
The treaty had been an "uneasy compromise" between federalists and anti-federalists. "We have got our comeuppance in terms of the votes in France and the Netherlands for a variety of reasons," Sir Stephen said. "I don't think any of us yet knows fully what's going on the minds of electorates."
He recalled that the highest level of support for the EU in Britain at about 65 per cent was achieved at the time of the Single European Act with a series of television ads highlighting the benefits of membership.
The "basic problem" for Labour was having to look over its shoulder for fear of losing the support of the Murdoch press. As part of his campaign for the leadership, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had, largely as a tactic, "played the Eurosceptic card" and was "instinctively - these days anyway - less European than Blair".
Could anything be rescued out of the constitutional treaty? It would be a mistake, in his view, to come back with anything called a constitutional treaty.
"It was a bit of hubris," Sir Stephen added. "I don't myself think one can come back very easily with little bits of it in the short term; maybe in the longer term."
He added: "I do hope that the enlargement project can be kept on track because it has been one of Europe's biggest success stories."