And how will the City be better off isolated and outside of the EU exactly? Aside from the fact that it won't be subject to stringent measures and taxation in order to keep it in check?

Are you aware that the UK is planning to take the ECB to court because the plans are afoot that will essentially mean clearing houses will have to relocate to the eurozone? How is the City going to remain strong and hold a strong future position when it's on the outside of the EU? Seriously, blinkered little island thinking will get us nowhere.

The 'Bulldog' spirit is pathetic, it's not even true. Cameron turned up and got nothing for the UK, that was his sole aim and he failed. 'Bulldog' my arse, most of the EU would like to see us out as we tend to turn up, ask what is in Britain's best interest and then stall everything the EU want to do if stamping our feet doesn't work. Cameron moved his alignment to small right wing/fascist parties in the EU and so it's no surprise we stand alone and isolated.

Seriously, don't think it's all 'bulldog' to be asking why we should be in the EU, the EU have been wanting us out for a while as we only ever go in trying to find out what's is best for the UK alone.

Can the UK stand alone like Switzerland? I'd like to know exactly how.

Don't get me wrong, Sarkozy and Merkel are just as bad with their own inherent political objectives they're trying to push with their short sighted aims but to think Cameron was being all 'bulldog' is childish and, well, wrong. He's out of his depth.

er it wont be outside the EU, it maybe outside the Eurozone but the UK will still be firmly inside the EU.

we still wont be outside the EU.


So we should have rolled over and said yes?

just like every other country in the EU then, unless they are being bullied or bribed to go in a certain direction eg Ireland and the vote until you agree with us referendums.

Cameron could of done the easy thing and said yes and then had a referendum, which would have voted no.

[/quote]

We may still be in the EU, but do you think anyone else in the organisation will take any notice?

Cameron's isolated the UK from the EU in more ways than perhaps he anticipated, I fear.

We may still be in the EU, but do you think anyone else in the organisation will take any notice?

Cameron's isolated the UK from the EU in more ways than perhaps he anticipated, I fear.[/quote]
You could argue that the UK is now in a stronger position, as any new treaties or changes of treaties would still require the UK to vote yes to it.
The other complication is the role of the EU institutions, as they are suppose to work for all 27 nations and not for the eurozone. Any change to their remits are likely to encounter legal challenge after legal challenge.

A stronger position, perhaps. Yelling ineffectually from the sidelines while all the other global players ignore us.

We don't make stuff any more. We don't export anything like the amounts of stuff we did back in the 1940s and 1950s. We have nothing to offer the world that other countries don't already have. All we seem to be is an off-shore financial services company, and the banksters could quite easily just up-sticks and move somewhere else, leaving us with just the high quality merchandise we do produce, and tourism.

In my opinion, we're stuffed. More stuffed than we were before.

Looking more inwardly, I'm hoping this crack in the coalition will lead to the greater things.

So surely then the position in fact hasn't changed at all? There are points to argue in favour of the stance Cameron took and points against it, but what I really can't get on with is the way the political right have been trying to sell this as some great victory. It isn't. We got nothing. We won nothing. At best our position in the same, at worst we've pissed off the other major european nations who will now do pretty much everything they can to marginalise us in future, so we can't 'mess things up' for them again.
The yammering about polls is hilarious. 69% of people asked said they were in favour of the position Cameron took, but less than 10% could actually explain what it was.


Indeed. However the bare fact is the other major powers of the EU are in the eurozone, and therefore the EU is, effectively, the eurozone. If it came down to a straight fight between the 'Eurozone' EU members and the 'Non eurozone' EU members, the former group has all the muscles.

Jon

That’s fine. Let us run the local stuff - emptying the bins, keeping the roads fixed. Let all the important stuff happen on a European level. Defence, taxation, etc. etc.. We might as well, we don’t own much of out infrastructure anyway (even though I am firmly in favour of renationalising anything of vital national significance).


No more “unelected” than the miscreants, thugs and warlords who fought out the current boundaries that make up our nation states. Even though these dynasties have become little more than ceremonial figureheads, they once had the power to have very nasty sharp objects into your person if you disagreed with them. We happen to want to cling to these boundaries because we are used to them. However, a quick look at the national borders pre WWI and now in Europe will show big differences. Most of those border changes were results of conflict. Some administrative. I expect we’ll see more this century.

Right now, we see our political system as giving us some power. We get a vote every 4 or 5 years, and down to some form of mob rule, we get a political leader who attempts to steer the country for a few years. However, as I think you are all beginning to see, there is more at play than the will of the people. Did you have any direct say in how Cameron deported himself last week? If you answer is anything other than “no” then you must be a Eurosceptic Conservative Back bencher, or someone in the city with a lot of cash. Not even Nick Clegg wanted this, as witness to his thoughts being broadcast yesterday. I bet he didn’t know quite what was going to be said or done. Right now, I’d say that Cameron doesn’t have a proper mandate to make such a decision. He is about as unelected as the “unelected body” of which you speak. He has an agenda with “eyes only” and “top secret” written on it. Not even his deputy gets to see it.

We also have the idea that someone with little or no experience in running a country has some understanding of the working, nuances and mechanics of a vast institution like the EU. Personalities of the country leaders aside for a moment, the workings of the EU is done mostly by, yes, unelected people. But the same can be said of Whitehall. The civil servants running each department aren‘t elected. Yet they keep the system running, and their careers and experience span governments. I’d say that these people are far batter suited to run the system based on their experience and knowledge than someone with at most a five year horizon. They are the engine room. Just right now, they happen to be stoking the boilers, oiling the pistons and polishing the brass of a ship being steered towards an iceberg by someone who clearly has little knowledge of cartography.

These people behind the screens have been given an interesting complexion by the tabloid press here - and a lot of people see them as interfering numbskulls who invent silly rules. Yes, any large institution is going to burp out something odd from time to time, but if that is all they did, then it would have collapsed many decades ago.

There were dark mutterings of a General Election on the radio today.

If Clegg grows a spine and resigns from the cabinet (note: I'm not saying his position is right, just that if he cares that much about what has been done he really shouldn't carry on sitting next to the bloke who has done it) followed by the other LibDem members of the cabinet, surely that would mean an effective dissolution of the coalition? If that happened, well, it doesn't automatically trigger a general election but it's certainly true that it would make the task of governing pretty much untenable for the Tory party, so we'd most likely end up having one in relatively short order anyway.

This is a very... interesting moment. Clegg is faced with a stark choice - he can either publicly stick to his principles and the views of the majority of his party and therefore resign, almost certainly force an early general election and be pretty much annihilated in the polls, or he can publicly swallow it to remain in at least the pretence of power, although surely any sane person would take recent events to provide ample proof that the libdems influence on actual government is bordering on nil.

So which is it Nick? One way, you'll end up being politically irrelevant but with some dignity, the other way you'll stick around for a bit longer but will be seen to value even the illusion of being in power over any sort of principle and will have made yourself politically irrelevant through doing so. Nice choice. Good luck with that.

Jon

Clegg's like any politician - once they've held even a vestige of power, they'll cling to it like a Jack Russell to a kid's leg. He'll know that if he stays where he is, he at least has a change to exert some influence, no matter how small.

I fail to see what influence he has. Every so often the LibDems pipe up about some concession they’ve got from the Tories, but we know that the Tories resent the LibDems being so close to government, spoiling their fun. We also know that the Big Picture is one painted by Cameron and Osborne. Any concessions are small.

If Clegg does force a General Election, the LibDems will be decimated. I don’t think Milliband has the balls either to run the country. To be honest, none of the three party leaders seem fit for purpose.

What some of the Germans and French broadsheets think :

Der Spiegel: Britain and EU: The Failure of a Forced Marriage
Frankfurter Allgemeine: Kauder and Brüderle critcise Britain
Le Monde: The City of London is not worth a European rupture

Frankly, most of my European friends are puzzled as to why the UK has such an incredibly tolerant culture and yet sits off the corner of Europe acting like Uncle Knobhead. Most of them wish that the UK would calm down, grow up and get involved. The rest, however, are delighted that the UK will be less and less involved; you have to invite Uncle Knobhead to the wedding reception because he' s Mutti's brother - but everyone knows he's childish, he smells, he never buys a round and they secretly hope he's on holiday.

I have to say that while I agree with much of what is being written in those articles, there's also a lot of chickens being counted in them. The attitude could best be summarised as 'Britain finally threw it's toys out of the pram once too often so frankly we're glad to be rid of them and once we get things sorted out they'll regret it' but there are absolutely no guarantees at this point that things can be sorted out. Der Spiegel's article talks about new controls on fiscal processes like they are the panacea for the whole mess but the Eurozone had those before and chose to ignore them. Greece will almost certainly fall outside whatever limits are set and will either have to default or have to leave. Germany will have to bail out Italy and possibly one or both of the Iberian countries in the long run, which won't prove popular domestically. Ok, Britain may have jumped over the side but the boat is still taking on water at an alarming rate.


The problem is we have a political establishment that is schizophrenic on Europe, so we lurch from one extreme to the other, like Uncle Knobhead after a half dozen pints at the reception. One minute claiming to be Europe's best friend, the next asking Europe to step outside, then finally dropping his trousers on the dance floor and loudly singing a rude song about goblins. This combined with the establishment's almost blind subservience to America - seriously, can anyone name any point in the last 50 years where being 'America's friend' has actually done us an ounce of good - means our relationship with the rest of Europe remains utterly dysfunctional.

Jon

Effectively it will be outside.


I wasn't saying that, what I was implying was that he shouldn't have done what previous Tory PMs have done and just wandered out of the meeting without getting something for us and the EU.

Limp and ineffectual is what he was and was easily bowled over by Sarkozy and Merkel because he has sidelined the UK by palling up with small right wing/facist parties and has therefore no support with which to pry some leverage.

Pathetic.

Edit: Interestingly Clegg is nowhere to be seen during DCs speech on the matter.

the civil service may run the departments but they do not govern the elected members of parliament govern
and i believe you are school teacher (from memory) yet you can not make the difference between civil service and government, interesting ...

we are still full members of the EU (with a veto) not even the rest of the EU can change that without completely changing the EU ...