NMIRI

February 20, 2003

COMMENTARY
Wall Street Journal Europe

Fighting on Two Fronts

By RUPERT DARWALL

These are dangerous times for Tony Blair. The British prime minister's courage and leadership in arguing the need to disarm Saddam Hussein belies his weakened domestic position. Mr. Blair is a politician with an almost feline sense of power, so his vulnerability is not the product of political miscalculation or overplaying his hand. Rather it is a combination of conviction and circumstance; the former his own, the latter caused by failing policies at home.

On the European front Mr. Blair's main opponent is French President Jacques Chirac. Mr. Blair rejects the old rules of the European game, which say that Europe must be led by the Franco-German duumvirate. The letter written by the eight European leaders published here last month is a direct challenge to French authority. If the views of the signatories of that letter were to prevail, it would mean the end of France's hegemonic role in Europe. It is a battle President Chirac has to win. And his main obstacle is Tony Blair.

The action of France and Germany in undermining the credibility of the threat of force, the one thing that President Chirac has admitted would make Saddam disarm peacefully, makes sense when viewed from the perspective of the internal power politics of the European Union. Thus the U.N. Security Council has become a theater onto which has been projected, to borrow the title of a celebrated history book, the struggle for the mastery of Europe.

The longer this goes on, the more it weakens Tony Blair and other leaders such as Jose Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi. In the absence of a decision to go to war, that stalling would go on indefinitely.

Foreign-policy realists analyzing French policy tend to conclude that Paris will inevitably buckle down and support a further U.N. resolution authorizing force. This is a less sure thing than it appears.

True, France will make its decision on what it believes are in its interests. In this case it will be on the basis of the trade-off between the damage done to the U.N., where France has a veto at the Security Council, and being the leading state in Europe. What's troubling about that equation from the British perspective is that, nowadays, the wider world stage is less important to France than dominance of the EU. Because Mr. Blair's ability to ride the opposition within his own party to war would be enormously helped by a fresh resolution, France has an incentive to deny one to Mr. Blair.

It would be easier for Mr. Blair to dispense with a second resolution if his government's domestic agenda was working. On winning a second term in 2001, Mr. Blair interpreted his victory as an instruction from the electorate to deliver world-class public services. But the results have not been delivered. When in 2000 Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown's Treasury decided to increase public spending on health care by 50% over four years, it had little idea how to spend the extra money in ways to maximize value. Unsurprisingly, much of the money is being wasted. Meanwhile, taxes are rising by 2.5 percentage points of GDP, with an £8 billion hike in National Insurance payments (income tax by a different name), taking effect from April.

For the prime minister, the answer to underperforming public services is competition and consumer choice. But Mr. Brown's perspective is quite different. Earlier this month, the chancellor set out the case against what he called "marketization" in a lengthy rebuttal of the prime minister. Consumer choice works for things like the weekly shopping, but in health care, the chancellor claimed, "We know that the consumer is not sovereign." Within days, the Health Secretary Alan Milburn, speaking for the Blairite camp, countered: "We are in a consumer age whether people like it or not. What will destroy the public services is the idea that you can retain the ethos of the 1940s in the 21st century." When ministers argue like that in public, divisions in private run deep.

It is the confluence of opposition to the use of force in Iraq and a blocked domestic agenda that is so corrosive to Mr. Blair's authority. The unpopularity of the first weakens the prime minister's ability to confront the second. How immediate is the danger to Tony Blair? In 1990, Margaret Thatcher fell following the Rome European summit, when she was ambushed and isolated by demands of the other heads of government for political union.

Mr. Blair's position is different, to be sure. He has allies in Europe, thanks in part to President Chirac overreaching himself. At that time, the mechanism for removing a Conservative leader lay exclusively with Tory members of parliament. The key to this prime minister's survival is maintaining cabinet unity. But that comes at a price. Inevitably his dominance over his colleagues is being lessened and he can no longer resolve the dispute with Mr. Brown on his own terms.

In other words, Mr. Blair is no longer the master of his government and party that he has been up to now. Mr. Blair's problem is that opponents of the war within his own party will not forgive him for being right about the war after it is finished.

Mr. Darwall is a board director of Reform, an independent campaign to reform public services (www.reformbritain.com).