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The Blair Government and Europe: The Policy of Containing the Salience of European Integration

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Abstract

One of the most conspicuous European policy legacies of the Blair premiership pertains to its public salience: whereas European integration featured as a high-salience issue at the beginning of New Labour's tenure, it was transformed into a low-salience issue at the end of Tony Blair's period in office. Given the British public's euroscepticism and New Labour's relatively pro-European outlook, the decline in the salience of European policy accorded to the Blair government's electoral interests. As European policy could be expected to figure as an electoral liability for New Labour insofar as it was salient enough to become a significant dimension of issue voting, the Blair government faced strong electoral incentives to contain the public salience of European integration. New Labour responded to this incentive by pursuing a mix of different governing strategies that were suited to contribute to the pronounced downward trend in the salience of European integration. Specifically, the Blair government sought (1) to defuse the European policy cleavage between the two main British parties, (2) to depoliticise European policy decisions, (3) to delegate veto power to the general public, and (4) to defer the making of conclusive decisions on contentious European issues.

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Notes

  1. This article builds on a paper presented at the APSA's British Politics Group Conference, entitled ‘Britain after Blair. The Legacy and the Future’, Chicago, IL, 29 August 2007. I thank the participants of the conference, Thomas Jäger, Alexander Höse and the anonymous reviewers at British Politics for their comments and suggestions.

  2. A second precondition for political issues to become a source of issue voting is the existence of a discernible cleavage between government and opposition. Only insofar as voters are presented with real possibilities for choice on a policy field by the competing political elites, can elections be employed to issue a verdict on the parties’ respective stances on the matter in question (Butler and Stokes, 1974, 276–295).

  3. This reasoning only applies to New Labour's electoral competition with parties that represent a more eurosceptic stance than the Labour Party. It does, therefore, not pertain to the Liberal Democrats that were on the pro-European side of New Labour for the entire period under study. Similar to the Blair government, the Liberal Democrats had little electoral incentive to push the public salience of European policy (Sherrington, 2006, 74–75). I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

  4. See Ipsos Mori Attitudes Towards Europe, 25 June 2000, www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/2000/notw000623.shtml.

  5. The selected newspapers are the Guardian, the Times/Sunday Times, the Daily/Sunday Mirror and the Daily/Sunday Mail. Thus, the sample includes (1) broadsheets and tabloids as well as (2) relatively pro-European and Labour-friendly papers and more eurosceptic and conservative papers. The Sun could not be selected for the analysis, because it was not covered by the LexisNexis database prior to the year 2000.

  6. See Ipsos Mori, European Parliament Elections 1999: Public Attitudes, 16 February 1999, www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/1999/eu990208.shtml.

  7. See ICM Research, Guardian Campaign Poll, 3 May 2001, www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2001/guardian-campaign-poll3-may-2001.htm.

  8. The intense reporting of the British press on the introduction of the euro notes and coins in the eurozone is also highlighted by Julia Firmstone's analysis of the leading articles in selected British newspapers on the days before and after the changeover: about 12% of all leading articles that were published in the selected newspapers between 15 December 2001 and 31 January 2002 in some way or another dealt with the single European currency (Firmstone, 2003).

  9. Since the evidence on New Labour's governing strategies is strictly qualitative, it is methodologically infeasible, however, to employ statistical techniques to pinpoint the exact contribution of these strategies to the decline of the issue's salience.

  10. For at least two reasons the pertinence of such crowding out effects should not be overemphasised. First, the relationship between the salience of two issue areas is not unidirectional but reciprocal. As much as the increased salience of one issue can be said to mitigate the public's attention to another issue, a decline in the salience of an issue should equally enhance the propensity of the public to focus its attention on other issues. Second, the reciprocal relationship between the salience of political issues cannot be conceived of as being confined to two isolated issue areas but rather extends to all issues on the political agenda. It is inherent to the relative nature of issue salience that co-variations between the public salience of different issues are ubiquitous. At the same time, there is no one-to-one relation between the salience of any two issues. It would thus be erroneous to account for a decline in one issue's public salience simply in terms of an increase in another issue's public salience and vice versa.

  11. For a comprehensive statement of the five economic tests see HM Treasury (1997).

  12. I owe this point to an autonomous reviewer.

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  1. Institute for Political Science, University of Cologne, Germany

    Kai Oppermann

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Oppermann, K. The Blair Government and Europe: The Policy of Containing the Salience of European Integration. Br Polit 3, 156–182 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2008.1

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