Can the Prime Minister win his battle against the Common Agricultural Policy?
Can the Prime Minister win his battle against the Common Agricultural Policy? There are many arguments that Tony Blair can win in Europe: a frontal assault on EU agriculture policy is not one of them. If Mr Blair really wanted to appeal over the heads of other leaders to European electorates for a more flexible, agile and successful EU, he would have chosen a different battleground. Other European governments are convinced that Mr Blair has decided to bash the CAP for domestic reasons, not because this is the true path to a forward-looking 21st-century European Union, as he claims. Is the CAP as wasteful and archaic as the Blair government says? The CAP has many faults but the days of food mountains and prices boosted far above world levels have long gone. Farm prices in the EU are now, on average, 30 per cent above the world market, compared to 80 per cent in the 1980s. The most recent reform of the CAP in 2002 – claimed by Mr Blair’s Government as a great British victory – cut the li
