Britain set to shelve vote on EU constitution

Jack Straw

LONDON - UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is expected to shelve plans for a referendum in Britain on the new European Union constitution, already overwhelmingly rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands.

The move is one step short of publicly declaring the constitution dead, an act for which no EU government wants to take the lead for fear of being blamed for its demise.

However, political analysts say it is in effect the death knell for a charter that advocates argue is vital to streamline the 25-nation bloc's cumbersome bureaucracy but opponents say would move too much power to Brussels.

"I will be amazed if Straw doesn't explicitly or implicitly make it clear that Britain will not go ahead with the referendum plans," Anthony King, professor of politics at Essex University, told Reuters.

"My guess is that he will signal -- even if he doesn't say in as many words -- that he and the British government regard the constitution as dead," he said after voters in two of the EU's founder member states threw the bloc into crisis by rejecting the charter in referendums last week.

Straw is due to address parliament at 3.15pm on Monday (2.15am Tuesday NZ time). When the government announced its referendum plan late last year, it was clear the intention was to hold it in the first few months of 2006.

PERIOD OF REFLECTION

Officially, Britain, which takes the helm of the EU in July for six months, insists that everything should wait for the EU summit on June 16 marking the end of Luxembourg's presidency.

That view still holds, in spite of a call for ratification to proceed from French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after they held an emergency meeting in Berlin on Saturday.

"We believe that it is necessary to have a period of reflection leading up to discussion at the Council of Ministers meeting on June 16," a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said.

Ten EU countries, accounting for about half the bloc's population, have approved the constitution but the rejections by French and Dutch voters have raised doubts about whether it remains viable.

Opinion polls in Denmark, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic -- once favourable to the constitution -- have turned negative since the French and Dutch referendums on May 29 and June 1 respectively.

Blair, in power for a third and final term and keen to secure a legacy other than the unpopular Iraq war, has long declared an ambition to put Britain at the heart of Europe.

However, while ratification of the constitution could have been just the epitaph for which he is looking, deeply Eurosceptic Britons were unlikely to have done him the favour.

"I suspect that Blair would have liked the constitution to have been adopted by the whole of Europe -- after all the British government put a lot of effort into drafting it," King said.

"But now that the French and the Dutch have said 'No', Tony Blair has got off a political hook because it would have been rejected by the British people," he said.

The issue has arisen as EU leaders search for an agreement on the next mid-term budget for the bloc for 2007-2013, which has been held up by the refusal of major contributors, including Germany, to increase their payments.

- REUTERS