The imploding Eurozone is the biggest danger to the world. How is that good for business? Most of those whining are the very same people who dismissed sceptical economists when the euro was about to be launched, smearing them as nationalists. Yet the sceptics were right and the Europhiles dangerously, shockingly deluded. It makes no sense for the UK to accept bad rules that destroy jobs. Only in Europe do people believe they have to share political institutions to trade together.
And how can anybody believe the UK needs to deepen its trading links with Europe, the part of the world most affected by stagnation and demographic decline, at a time when Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and growing parts of Africa are booming? It is time to readjust the UK’s foreign and economic policy. We need to be global, not parochially and inwardly European. One argument that has been making the rounds is that the City is only attractive to global banks because of the UK’s membership of the EU. But then why does non-EU Switzerland have such a large financial and business sector, and why does everybody agree that non-EU Singapore, Dubai, New York and Hong Kong are London’s biggest rivals?
So far the prime minister has emerged as an accidental Eurosceptic; his dramatic shift in UK policy came about almost by chance and partly as a result of incompetent civil servants. But that doesn’t matter. History only remembers great decisions – it never asks why they were taken.