Evidently my previous posting greatly overestimated the strength of David Cameron's backbone. In making the UK the only one of the 27 EU members to reject outright the idea of a new Treaty (though three other countries have taken it under advisement for the time being), he has certainly delighted his Eurosceptic Tory colleagues. The rest of us, however, have precious little to be happy about.
Just consider the bare facts. The UK has a higher public sector deficit than any other country in the EU, aside from Greece. It has lower growth than most EU countries, but higher inflation. This doesn't sound like a very strong platform for "going it alone".
And why has Cameron taken this risk? It's to protect the UK's financial sector, which is by any measure the most bloated in the world. UK bank assets amount to more than 500% of annual GDP, far higher than for any comparable developed economy. In the US, for example, the ratio is closer to 100%.
Much of Europe believes, with considerable justification, that the financial crisis is largely the result of unregulated and unproductive growth in financial "services", with the City of London at the root of the problem. There have been times when the UK government has appeared sympathetic to this analysis, but evidently the Tories are not prepared to do anything that might jeopardise the huge tax revenues that the City currently provides. More than 10% of total UK tax revenues come from the City. That's a lot of money. Of course, it's just a fraction of what the financial crisis has cost the UK in the past three years, but evidently Cameron and his xenophobic cronies are choosing to ignore that side of the picture.
We can only hope that the UK banking system never needs to be rescued, because after last night's debacle in Brussels, it's hard to see who would come to Britain's aid.
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