LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Tony Blair: European Convention
built 629 days ago
"Tony Blair was caught out yesterday for falsely claiming that a European Union directive had forced a Cotswolds village to rip out its playground seesaw - when no such directive exists. Playgrounds are, in fact, not regulated by the EU."
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Blair himself may see his greatest failure on Europe as the failure to create a pro-European public in Britain. In fact opinion polls suggest that opinion has become more anti-European during his term of office. To reverse this would be a Herculean task under the best of circumstances, given the difficulty of explaining the importance of Europe to people who have lost their sense of history, and the distortions they are daily fed by the press. Perhaps this failure, crucial though it is, should not be taken too hard, since Britain is by no means unique in this respect. Such levelling down elsewhere may not be entirely undesirable if it means a more realistic view of what Europe is and what it can be; but it would be better if it were matched by some levelling up on the part of Britain.
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Although he praises Blair’s empathy with the US, he describes Blair’s ‘failure to try to coordinate a European response’ in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks as ‘regrettable’. This, he contends, led to divisions within the EU over policy towards the US and gave the impression that Europe was:
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