BRITAIN: British prime minister Tony Blair resisted the embrace of triumphant Eurosceptics yesterday as he vowed to fight on for reform of the EU budget from a firmly "pro-European perspective".
Reporting to MPs on the failure of last week's European Council to agree a new budget, Mr Blair insisted the UK was neither isolated nor to blame.
In a low-key statement in the Commons, Mr Blair avoided explicit attacks on French president Chirac or German chancellor Schröder, while insisting that Europe's current budgetary arrangements were not "fit for purpose" and the challenges of globalisation in the 21st century.
Mr Blair stressed it was not the UK's position that poorer countries should meet the cost of enlargement, and repeated his willingness to have a radical review address the twin "anomalies" of both the Common Agricultural Policy and the £3 billion a year "rebate".
However, he insisted the proposals presented at last week's two-day summit "fell way short" of the need for fundamental review and that he could not have recommended the proposed deal to parliament.
"It was not the right deal for Britain. It was not the right deal for Europe," declared Mr Blair as he launched an implicit attack on the French and German leaderships.
"It is said the failure to reach a deal has deepened Europe's crisis, that Europe's credibility demanded a deal," said Mr Blair.
But "no" he countered: "Europe's credibility demands the right deal - not the usual cobbled together compromise in the early hours of the morning but a deal which recognises the nature of the crisis."
That won a chorus of approval from Conservative MPs, a number of whom playfully welcomed Mr Blair to "the Eurosceptic club".
However, Mr Blair maintained Britain would only win and retain allies from a position in the European mainstream, as Tory leader Michael Howard thought to detect "a real change in the way that he [ Mr Blair] and some of his ministers are approaching reform of the European Union".
Mr Howard ventured "if this conversion is genuine, no one will be more delighted than I am" while congratulating Mr Blair "for protecting the rebate".
However, Mr Howard pressed Mr Blair to explain a comment made to the BBC in which he suggested that, if he got the deal he wanted, "Britain would pay more, not less, because of the way it would work out".
The Tory leader also said Mr Blair had been wrong to sign up to the existing CAP arrangements in 2002.
And he quoted Labour's own representative on the convention that led to the European constitution, Gisela Stuart MP, to tell Mr Blair he had "wasted the last two years trying to sell an outdated vision of the European Union when he should have been making the case for a more flexible, more liberal Europe of nation states".
Quoting the determination by EU leaders that the "No" votes in France and Holland did not "call into question the validity of continuing with the ratification process", Mr Howard also challenged Mr Blair to say if this meant Britain would still have a referendum on the constitution.
"If not, what on earth does he mean by that phrase he agreed with the other EU leaders," demanded Mr Howard.
On Thursday, in a speech to the European parliament in Brussels outlining his plans for the British presidency which starts next week, Mr Blair will say it is "a false choice" to suggest Europe must decide between social protection and economic efficiency.