Blair Wins Allies for EU Budget Overhaul After Summit

Originally from: brentns
                        
June 20 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, after torpedoing the European Union's proposed budget over agricultural subsidies, is picking up allies in a campaign to tilt EU spending from supporting farmers to modernizing the region's sluggish economy.
Blair is seeking to exploit the sagging political fortunes of French President Jacques Chirac to break the EU's 50-year bias toward handing out money for agriculture.
``Britain's not isolated,'' Blair told the House of Commons today. ``Britain has got allies both on what we want to achieve and on the budget debate.'' The bloc's 105 billion-euro ($128 billion) annual budget goes for ``too much old policy, too little new policy,'' Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm said in an interview after the Netherlands joined the U.K. and Sweden in blocking a new seven-year financing package at a weekend summit in Brussels. Ending on the 190th anniversary of Napoleon's defeat by a British-led force at Waterloo, just south of Brussels, the failed budget talks set the stage for a reckoning between Britain and slower-growing France over how to boost the economy and use Europe's weight in the world.
``We are going toward a much more deregulated, free-market Europe,'' said Emmanuel Ferry, senior economist at Exane-BNP Paribas SA in Paris. ``The French conception of European construction is weakening. The British agenda will be strengthened by French weakness.''
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``Be careful about describing this as a British problem because I don't think it's true,'' Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson, who meets with Blair tomorrow for talks in London, said in an interview after the summit. ``It was a problem for those who defended the old agricultural policy.'' http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=a9rPDzrhC_Nw&refer=top_world_news

Eurocrats threaten to obstruct Blair's plans
A leading European Union official warned Tony Blair yesterday that the European establishment would refuse to co-operate with him unless he drops his opposition to deeper political integration and "more Europe".
The remarks, by the EU development commissioner, Louis Michel, betrayed the dislike that many in Brussels harbour for Mr Blair, widely seen in federalist circles as a Eurosceptic in European's clothing and far too close to President George W Bush.
Mr Michel, a former Belgian foreign minister, conceded that the newly re-elected Prime Minister had the upper hand over other leaders facing problems in the polls, such as French President Jacques Chirac, or Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, but he still needed help from the European establishment.
Mr Michel told RTBF radio: "The British Prime Minister has the upper hand, but to run a good presidency, it's necessary that every-one else helps … We'll help him, but on condition that it's all heading in the direction of more Europe, and the direction of deeper [integration]." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/21/weu121.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/21/ixnewstop.html