IS DAVID CAMERON A BEEF-EATING SURRENDER MONKEY? !!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/rober ... d-britain/


By Robert Colvile

PoliticsLast updated: December 8th, 2011





David Cameron is about to make the most sudden transformation since Clark Kent walked into a phone booth. At home, he is castigated as a weak leader, a beef-eating surrender monkey who is missing out on a historic opportunity to demand the repatriation of powers (or, more charitably, as a Conservative mugged by reality – a genuine Eurosceptic whose alarm at the prospect of a new Great Depression sensibly outweighs his hostility to fiscal union).

If that's the case, someone should tell the Europeans. For while the PM sets out from Britain as Cowardly Cam, he arrives as Dangerous Dave, the man threatening to pull down the whole euro-edifice around their heads. In his pre-conference remarks, Jose Manuel Barroso warned: "What I expect from all Heads of State and Government is they do not come saying what they can not do but what they will do for Europe.All the world is watching us. And what the world awaits from us is not more national problems but European solutions." In short – look out, Britain's about.

Don't believe me? Look at the front page of Die Welt today, which tells us "Britain wants out of Europe." A piece by Robin Alexander on the paper's website (English version here via Google's wonky translation software) lays things bare. What we perceived as a surrender by Dave – limiting his demands for concessions to a Tobin tax that was never going to work anyway – is in fact a stick of dynamite thrown into the eurozone, the demand for Britain to be able to create a regulation-free Hong Kong on the edge of Europe in which the irresponsible speculation that Angela Merkel blames for the 2008 crisis can flourish untamed. So shocking are Cameron's proposals, says the piece, that those in Berlin thought Cameron was having a laugh – and surely he would never have the crazed audacity to put these proposals on the table?

Whatever the outcome of tomorrow's summit, the basic problem remains, months into this seemingly endless crisis: an utterly incompatible interpretation of its causes and consequences between Britain and the Continent. We see the euro as a galactically stupid economic experiment that is wrecking many if not most of those nations who are part of it, locking them into exchange rates that mean their economies can never, ever become competitive with Germany's, still less the rest of the world. They see the euro as an irreversible expression of political and economic solidarity, under threat not from its own internal contradictions but from the dangerous speculation of the Anglo-Saxon capitalists who have already done so much to humble the West.

So, as if we needed another element of instability in this crisis, here it is. The Europeans don't and can't understand what the British want. And the British don't and can't understand what the Europeans want. And poor David Cameron is caught between them, trying to find the impossible deal that will satisfy these utterly incompatible constituencies.


Tags: Angela Merkel, Britain, David Cameron, eu summit, euro, Eurosceptics, Eurozone, financial crisis, Jose Manuel Barroso