Blair to sidestep EU budget 'machismo'

Tony Blair reports back to MEPs on progress with the British EU presidency and to outline plans in the two months ahead.

The UK leader took the EU helm on July 1 and may face European Parliament questions over his pace of work – especially on future Brussels budgets for 2007 to 2013.

Blair will stress achievements – the opening of EU membership talks with Turkey and Croatia among them.

But some MEPs are set to accuse him of failing to live up to expectations after Blair's well-received June intervention in at a Strasbourg session of the parliament.

“June's speech was about setting out the overview of what the challenges were and what we wanted to achieve,” Blair’s spokesman said on Tuesday.

“Tomorrow is not the time for that. It's about a practical report back on what we, as a presidency, have been doing since June and how we move forward to achieve our aims between now and December.”

Blair will insist that debate over the EU’s ‘financial perspectives” will not be on the table at an informal summit of Europe’s leaders tomorrow.

“We have been very clear that we do not see Thursday as being about future financing,” his spokesman said.

London is keen to leave bitter budget battles, that saw deadlocked negotiations, in June to a formal December summit in Brussels.

Blair hopes that talks on the EU and globalisation at Hampton Court on Thursday will set the scene for more productive spending discussions.

One new proposal – backed by Brussels, Blair and French leader Jacques Chirac – is an EU ‘shock absorber’ fund to ease the strain of economic restructuring.

But the move may not play so well to the EU's biggest cash contributors - Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands - unless the UK trades in London's annual Brussels cash rebate.

“What we hope to achieve at Hampton Court is an overall strategic consensus on the direction for Europe, and then to use that consensus to shape the hard work of the next two months, which is filling in the overall strategy with specifics and working up to the point in December where we hope we will be able reach a deal on future financing.”

“This is not about macho politics on the budget, it's about establishing a strategic direction for the EU,” said the Downing Street spokesman.

The British EU presidency faces two critical tests in the two months ahead: sealing an budget deal and keeping a united European front on world trade talks.

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