Europe

With the European financial crisis rumbling on, anti-EU sentiment in Britain is deepening. Two polls — one by YouGov for PoliticsHome and the other by Angus Reid — show that 50 per cent of the public would vote for Britain to leave the EU if there was a referendum.   Of course, this is nothing new. Brits have long been the most eurosceptic of Europeans, as Fraser noted a couple of months ago. In fact, we’re the only country where more people think our membership of the EU is bad than think it’s good: The hardening of eurosceptic sentiment does seem to be due to current events: 34 per cent

The UK government is becoming increasingly concerned about the situation in the eurozone and the fact that there does not appear to be the political will to address it. One government source complained to me earlier today that “unless they get their act together the eurozone are in danger of fiddling while Rome burns.” Tonight, in a major departure from Britain’s previous softly-softly approach to the issue, George Osborne is issuing a statement calling on the eurozone countries to take “decisive action” to “prevent market uncertainty doing real damage to the world economy.” The Chancellor calls on eurozone countries to: “…now set out in detail how they plan to expand

If you strain your ears, and listen very carefully above the din of the phone hacking scandal, then you may just hear Nick Clegg’s voice wafting across the Channel from Paris. Our Deputy Prime Minister is on the Continent today, delivering a speech that, in other circumstances, might have made more of a splash. This is, after all, a speech in which he stands up for the eurozone, and chastises those eurospectics — some of them within the coalition parties — who are eagerly anticipating its collapse. Or as he puts it himself: “A successful eurozone is essential for a prosperous UK. So there is no room for Schadenfreude here,

We interview David Cameron for today’s issue of The Spectator. Here’s an extended version of that interview for CoffeeHousers: The most striking thing about David Cameron is how well rested he looks. You wouldn’t guess that he was the father of a ten-month-old baby, let alone Prime Minister. He has no bags under his eyes — unlike his staff. He also seems relaxed. He jovially beckons us in to his Downing Street office and then flops down into one of the two high-backed chairs and urges one of us to take the other: ‘the Chancellor’s chair’, he calls it, with a chuckle. The last time we interviewed him, during the

Say what you like about Jose Manuel Barroso, he’s a wily old card. The European Commission president makes public demands for Britain to surrender its rebate in European Union membership fees. The government refuses. Then, hey presto! Headlines suggesting that Brussels has been seen off. “Brussels bribe to buy off UK rebate,” says the Daily Mail. “Britain’s rebate is fully justified and we are not going to give way on it,” a Treasury spokesman tells the media. The quotation is true, Barroso did indeed offer £23 billion to tweak the UK funding formula, and a short-termist like Gordon Brown might have accepted. But the battle for Britain’s EU spending was

Before writing my column for The Spectator this week I asked one of the most clued-up Eurosceptics on the centre right what opt-outs Britain should push for in any negotiation over an EU treaty change. His answer, to my surprise, was “forget that, we should just leave”. This answer took me aback because this person had been the embodiment of the view that the European Union could be reformed from within. But people are dropping this view at a rapid rate for reasons that Matthew Parris explained with his typical eloquence in The Times (£) yesterday. I wrote in The Spectator this week that two Cabinet ministers now favour leaving

There has been much talk about what George Osborne told Alistair Darling about the EU bailout mechanism during those days in May between the election and the coalition being formed. But notes of a conversation between Osborne and Darling released today show that Osborne did urge Darling not to commit to anything that would have a lasting effect on the public finances. Osborne also suggested that the UK government might abstain due to the fact that the country was between governments. To which Darling’s reply was that the Cabinet Secretary’s advice was that the government was the government until a new one actually took office. It remains to be seen

The Foreign Secretary finds himself in the rather unique position today of trying to deal with the consequences of a crisis that he largely predicted. In May 1998, William Hague gave a speech warning that the single currency would lead to social unrest as governments tried to cope with one size fits all interest rates. It is a reminder of how much Hague was swimming against the tide of bien-pensant opinion that Michael Heseltine claimed this prediction was so extreme as to drive the Tories off the centre ground. But what is, perhaps, more interesting than Hague’s vindicated view that the euro, in a crisis, would be the ‘economic equivalent

In 1997 New Labour was not just a domestic programme; it was a foreign policy too. Known as the “Neue Mitte” in Germany, Blair’s Third Way soon attracted such converts as the German chancellor, the French prime minister and the Danish leader. In the end, it produced few results for Britain, failing – much as Harold Wilson did in the 1970s – to curry favour for the UK through party political links with other leaders. But for a few years, much as New Labour looked across the Atlantic to the Democratic Party, so Europe’s Social Democrats looked across The Channel. International recognition for his deficit reduction plan notwithstanding, David Cameron

A human wave of refugees is supposedly setting off for Europe from North Africa. But what are the real figures? The first thing to note that refugees from North Africa come at a time when there has been a sharp decrease in the number of asylum applicants in the 27 EU member-states. Eurostat says that in 1992 there were 670,000 applications in the EU-15 and in 2001 there were 424,500 applications in the expanded EU-27. But according to the UN, the 27 EU member-states registered only 247,300 asylum claims in 2009 and 235,900 in 2010, a 5 per cent annual decrease. Within this group, the 15 ‘old’ EU member-states saw

From the Number 10 website: The Prime Minister is pleased to confirm the following senior appointments: Sir Peter Ricketts, currently the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor, to become HM Ambassador to France; Sir Jon Cunliffe, currently the Prime Minister’s Advisor on Europe and Global Issues, to become the UK’s Permanent Representative to the European Union in Brussels; Sir Kim Darroch, currently the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU, to become the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser; and Sir Peter Westmacott, currently HM Ambassador France, to become HM Ambassador to Washington. These changes will take effect from January 2012. These appointments were approved by the Prime Minister and for the appointment