Tory Dan Hannan pakt EU en Cameron aan

Though David Cameron wants to remain in the EU, albeit on new terms, 72 per cent of Tory voters and 84 per cent of party members say they would vote to leave tomorrow. They evidently believe that any renegotiation would be, as the extraordinarily sharp 81-year-old peer puts it, ‘inconsequential’.

We are, in other words, being ordered to scramble on to a sinking ship. For there is no doubt that the euro is sinking. When Britain joined the then European Economic Community in 1973, Western Europe accounted for 38.5 per cent of the world economy. Today, that figure is 24 per cent, and in 2020 it will be 15 per cent. Far from being part of a large and prosperous market, we find ourselves confined in a cramped and dwindling customs union. Lord Lawson’s point about Britain being outnumbered and outvoted by the eurozone countries is not a future possibility, but a demonstrable observation of the truth.

Are we supposed to believe that the UK, with a population of 62 million, a maritime nation connected by language and law, commerce and kinship, habit and history to every continent, could not prosper under its own laws? Are we truly so diminished as a people?