THE LADDIE'S NOT FOR TURNING

Blair warns Chirac on the future of Europe (Philip Stephens and Cathy Newman, April 28, 2003, The Financial Times)

Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France's Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president's vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the prime minister foreshadows a continuing Anglo-French struggle about Europe's relationship with Washington. Mr Blair seeks to keep alive the prospect of British entry to the euro but he disavows any personal ambition to become president of the European Union.

Though his personal relationship with Mr Chirac has improved since the bitter row over France's veto of a second United Nations resolution, Mr Blair is clear that the strategic divide that opened over Iraq has not been bridged.

Meanwhile a new MORI poll for the FT reveals that 55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK's least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country's most reliable.

Welfare state reform battleground (Cathy Newman and Philip Stephens, April 27 2003, Financial Times)

Tony Blair has vowed to defy a groundswell of opposition from his party and the unions in order to "redraw" the welfare state with his radical programme of public service reform.

The prime minister told the Financial Times that the government had "got to opt for the radical, not the quiet life".

Insisting that he is "not going to depart from the path of reform", he says: "What we have got to do is fundamentally to redraw the way the 1945 welfare state settlement is implemented, and we have got to do it for health, for education, for the employment and labour markets, and actually in the longer term for pensions too."

Mr Blair makes clear that victory in Iraq has emboldened him to take on leftwing critics of his plans to give the best hospitals, schools and universities more money and freedom from state control.

Despite the unprecedented revolt of 139 Labour MPs opposed to military action in Iraq, Mr Blair is to risk a renewed clash with the left by ruling out any concessions on public service reform and pledging to "continue opening up" the NHS by "injecting into it the spirit of enterprise and initiative and innovation".

"I will do what is necessary to carry through the programme, yes . . . If the Labour party were to back away from public service reform, we would deal a heavy blow to public services," he said.

More than 100 Labour backbenchers could vote next month against foundation hospitals, which are to be freed from Whitehall control and allowed to borrow more money.

Mr Blair also opens a fresh front in the war of words with trade unions, dismissing threatened teachers' strikes as "NUT nonsense". Faced with a continuing pay dispute between the government and the firefighters, he insists: "We will not give in in any shape or form to any resurgent trade union militancy."

Confronting the French and Labor; what's not to like? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 27, 2003 11:45 PM