The end of the road

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Well, England has pulled the rope once too often and it broke. A few days ago I called the English hatred of Europe a mental illness; now we see it in full swing. The sulphurous pleasure that seems to dominate even GUARDIAN Comment-Is-Free columns seems to me wholly impossible to understand. These people imagine that a country of sixty million people can "renegotiate", to its own advantage its membership of a club of 28 countries and 400,000,000 people. One does not have to have a deep knowledge of the fact to call this an insane, out-of-touch-with-reality, diseased ideation.

Even worse, the final blow of the English knife could not have come at a worse time. Every European leader will feel that Cameron tried to blackmail them as they were struggling for the life of the European project. No wonder nobody wanted to speak with him this morning. Nigel Farage drew attention to President Sarkozy's fury, but I would be more worried about what must be an equally intense rage from Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. It's not just that she is, by everyone's acknowledgement, the most powerful person in Europe (give or take her fellow-countryman in the Vatican); it is that, as Silvio Berlusconi found out, fat, easily-mocked little Angela, with her frumpy one-size-too-small pants suits (and by the height of misfortune Hilary Clinton around to show how they should be worn) and her inability to speak any language but her own, is someone who makes you pay. Sarkozy may be here today and gone tomorrow, blown about by his mercurial energy, but Angela Merkel can and will remember. If she could end the apparently bomb-proof career of Europe's biggest scoundrel, she can certainly make any British politician regret the day they were born.

What do these people expect? The first demand to renegotiate British membership will be met by a series of actively damaging regulations that will cut European capital off from the City. Do they seriously think otherwise? You cannot negotiate to your advantage unless you are holding a really big stick, and England has none. English business, English exports, the English public and private accounts, none of them are anything worth writing home about. The only thing that stands out is the City, and exclusion from Europe will certainly damage that. Even granting that it can keep the confidence of the Russian, Arab and other third world billionaires who still flock to London with their more or less lawfully acquired wealth, to be left to trust on that sort of people would make the City an even dodgier-looking place than it is today. They speak of Switzerland; but Switzerland, apart from the ancient treaties that guarantee her neutrality, never left the impression of despising Europe and everything in it, and never used a moment of crisis to stab the Union in the back.

England's relationship with Europe is pathological

Comments

Re: The end of the road

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Sounds to me as if there was little I could have said which would not have caused offence to you. What I actually said was that the Tabloid-Tory idea that a country of sixty million people can "renegotiate", to its own advantage its membership of a club of 28 countries and 400,000,000 people was an insane, out-of-touch-with-reality, diseased ideation. What, in that, is offensive? There is, at present, a state in Great Britain and surrounding islands of sixty or more million inhabitants, whose head of government is David Cameron of that Ilk; and I called the idea that such a state could successfully browbeat a continent into doing the will of its Tory leaders "crazed, out of touch, diseased". The whole idea, including the vision of sixty million people following Tories and tabloids into their delirium. As for calling Scots "Britons," historically that has been a constant Scottish demand, and if that offends you, I suggest you take it out on your ancestors and not on me.