Blair to EU: Brexit Is Your Problem Too - Help Us Avoid It

(Bloomberg) -- Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair will deliver a message to European Union leaders in Brussels on Thursday: Brexit is your problem too, and you must help us avert it.

Britain’s departure from the bloc “weakens Europe’s standing and power the world over,” Blair will say in a speech at the European Policy Forum in the Belgian capital, according to extracts released by his office. “Britain without Europe will lose weight and influence. But Europe without Britain will also be diminished. And both of us will be less than we are and much less than we could be together.”

Blair has made no secret of his desire to reverse Brexit, repeatedly calling for a second referendum to allow the electorate the chance to weigh the final deal Prime Minister Theresa May secures with the EU. But he’s also acknowledged he’s the wrong person to fight that battle in Britain, tainted as he is with the U.K. electorate after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

His intervention in Brussels is an attempt to persuade European leaders that they can help avert Britain’s departure. Blair, who met with the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt on Wednesday, will tell his audience that “there are three legs to the stool upon which could sit a reconsideration of Brexit.”

EU Responsibility

The first is to persuade Britons that Brexit “has turned out much more complex and costly” than imagined -- a leg that is “increasingly robust.” The second leg -- which he described as easy to build but lacking sufficient workers, is to show there are “different and better ways of responding to the genuine underlying grievances beneath the Brexit vote.”

“The third is a willingness on the part of Europe to respond to Brexit by treating it as a ‘wake-up’ call to change in Europe and not just an expression of British recalcitrance,” Blair will say. “European leaders share the responsibility to lead us out of the Brexit cul-de-sac and find a path to preserve European unity intact.”

Britain’s leader from 1997 to 2007 will repeat a call he’s made before for British people to get a “final say” on May’s Brexit deal, the second former premier to make that case in two days. His predecessor, John Major, on Wednesday said Britons have a right to “reconsider” the choice they made in 2016, and while the government has to negotiate Brexit, “not any Brexit; not at all costs; and certainly not on any terms.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny, Stuart Biggs

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