Cameron's Moral Imperative

There were a couple of things which struck me particularly about the Charles Moore interview of Delors in yesterday's Telegraph. One was the comment that Britain, though not in the euro and thus not sharing the burden is just as embarrassed as the Europeans by the financial crisis. I would be astounded that we feel in the least embarrassed about the euro problem as we warned of the downside at the time it was being contemplated. So why would we be embarrassed? Delors obviously thinks we should be. The other thing that struck me was his self regard, "I think for Mme Thatcher I was a curious personage: a Frenchman, a Catholic, an intellectual, a socialist " as if she was in some way in awe of him and his superior background. Clearly he knew nothing of Mrs Thatcher and her earlier life in which she would have met Frenchmen, catholics, intellectuals and socialists and dealt with them all just the same. What a snobbish, pompous, egotistical little man and what damage he has done. He denies the euro would have been a failure if all his strictures about how it should have been set up had been followed but he would say that wouldn't he. Proper fiscal union is never going to happen so long as the EU is a group of separate states and it will never be more than that. Thus all the fiddling going on now is not going to solve the problem, which is the euro itself. The problem can only be solved if the euro is replaced by each state's own currency. Peter Oborne in an article for the Telegraph on Friday thinks that Cameron has a great dilemma in that either he does everything he can to help the euro survive, at least for now, and risks the wrath of his party's eurosceptics or he goes along with his eurosceptics and risks the wrath of the EU leaders and Obama. There is no dilemma. He has do do what is right for the UK. You don't jump into the water with a drowning man unless you know you can rescue him without drowning yourself. The euro is going to sink anyway so the only moral choice Cameron can make is to announce a referendum to withdraw from the EU, the eurozone members of which  have demonstrated beyond a peradventure that they are a bunch of losers.