we are right.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...about-the-euro-thats-why-Europe-is-angry.html
I know some people are unsettled to see all these powerful Europeans getting so very, very cross. Angela Merkel has said that we werenât even negotiating properly. Nicolas Sarkozy can hardly bring himself to mention Britain by name and has been filmed apparently refusing to shake David Cameronâs hand. Across the Continent, the papers are full of wrathful headlines about the general arrogance and stupidity of the Englanders/Anglais/Inglesi. I watched some poor Lib Dem Euro MP who seemed about to explode with disgust at the UKâs handling of the recent summit.
And there must be many people in this country who find themselves a bit spooked by the vitriol of the criticism. For some days, the BBC has been telling us in sepulchral tones that we are âisolatedâ and âmarginalisedâ â as if a decision had been taken to abandon us in our misty island like a bunch of woad-painted savages. So I hope everyone will be reassured if I point out that our European friends and partners arenât really angry about the summit. Everyone is behaving as if there were something epoch-making about David Cameronâs use of the veto â as though some national Excalibur had been finally plucked from the rock, or as Trident had at last been launched from its briny lair.
The reality is that plenty of prime ministers have blocked things that arenât in this countryâs interests â from Thatcher on the EU budget to Tony Blair on the withholding tax. And plenty of other prime ministers have been far more obstreperous than the British â one thinks of Felipe González of Spain, who used to hold up EU summits until he felt he had got his hands on enough Irish cod and haddock.
No, they arenât really angry with us for opposing the new Treaty for Fiscal Union. The reason our brother and sister Europeans are so chronically enraged with the British is that we have been proved completely right about the euro. For more than 20 years, British ministers have been coming out to Brussels and saying that they just love all this single-market stuff, but that they doubt the wisdom of trying to create a monetary union. And for more than 20 years, some of us have been saying that the reason a monetary union wonât work is that you canât do it without a political union â and that a political union is not democratically possible.
We warned that you would need a kind of central Euro-government to control national budgets and taxation, and that the peoples of Europe wouldnât wear it. Now look. It wasnât the Anglo-Saxon bankers who caused the trouble in the eurozone, Sarkozy mon ami. It was the utter failure of the eurozone countries â starting with France, incidentally â to observe the Maastricht rules. It was the refusal of the Greeks to control their spending or to reform their social security systems. In Greece and Italy, the democratic leaders have been effectively deposed in the hope of appeasing the markets and saving the euro; and what makes the leaders of the eurozone countries even more furious is that it doesnât seem to be working.