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I'd have more sympathy for Eurosceptics if they had a more positive-sounding name, something like World Banking System Collapsophiles.
You have to admire their determination that the important thing now is to be able to decide for ourselves how straight our bananas are (insert your own euromyth here), even if the ensuing financial collapse means we have to pay for those bananas using a barter system (one banana = three shiny pebbles and my sister doing a dance for you).
So off to Brussels Cameron goes, with the Tory right asking him to show some 'bulldog spirit', which I presume means returning with a deal which guarantees us 20 millions tons of Chum and a squeaky cat toy for every citizen. And note I say tons not tonnes - it's that sort of thing that's vital to British interests even if a Euro collapse means we have to cover the whole of East Anglia with a giant piece of cardboard saying "Hungry and Homeless". In Chinese.
Still, it looks like Cameron's won the day at the summit thanks to a Boris Johnson inspired threat to dump 2000 bendy buses on Calais. He'll be heading back home having made absolutely sure that no further financial regulations are imposed on the City of London. Phew! I was worried, because lack of regulation of the City has been such a spectacular success in the past. He's also made sure that Britain will keep its rightful place firmly on the sidelines, arms folded, refusing to do anything at all, in keeping with advice from his new economic adviser, Carlos Tevez. Plus - and here is his greatest triumph - he's pledged to set up the No European Regulation Organisation or NERO, whose job will be to fiddle while Europe burns.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a referendum, as long as the question is "Are you really such a steaming idiot that you'd seriously want to take our economy on the financial equivalent of a Dignitas trip to Switzerland by playing the Little Englander/Scotlander/Northern Irelander/Waleser, when really we should be trying to avoid Eurogeddon and sort out this mess together with our biggest trading partner which if you didn't know is the EU you doofus?"
For me, it's clear. It doesn't matter how rich you are, the consequences of not being in Europe can be a devastating blow. Just ask Manchester City.
Follow David Schneider on Twitter: www.twitter.com/davidschneider
There is a difference between free trade and taking a sledgehammer to the prerogatives of democratically elected governments. I don't care if the last person to make a bad deal wore a red rose, that does not make the evisceration of popular sovereignty a progressive stance.
Basic economic realities are always hard for avowed (and, frankly, economically-illiterate) SWP folk to accept.
I'd love to do a live debate with you concerning your attitude. I'm working-class, I'm a Londoner, I put myself through university prior to a career in banking, and I'd give the world to take you head on and show you up for what you are - ill-informed and ideologically unsound.
Who bore the brunt of Blair Project Number 55,398 - "50% into Uni"? The rich? No - the poorest. 30k of debt and no job in sight. Never was a job in sight for them. Under which party did the poverty gap in the UK climb to its highest in a CENTURY ? New Labour.
Marching on Millbank any time soon? Didn't think so...just blame Clegg, he's easy.
Voted Labour in 97, never doing it again.
The second impact is the ever increasing power of the EU to control and dictate policy in the UK. I am no bendy banana, daily mail inhaling moron, but there is a very clear path that the EU has taken in creating more and more power focused towards Brussels. Go an look at the treaties that have followed after we agreed to join as a trade collective, Where this increased power may once have been a benefit to is all, can you honestly say that the EU is anything more than a sinking ship right now, and that really, we should be bloody grateful that nostalgic patriotism saved us from taking on the toxic Euro?
The EU is failing, clinging on to it longer will breed nationalism.
What these dyed-in-the-wool 80s-esque Socialist Workers Party types want us all to believe is that it's 1984 and it's all Tories-Rich, Labour-Poor.
The Labour party is overrun with millionaires, is packed with public school boys, and has no fingers in the Big Business pot that Clegg has had hot dinners.
I voted for that bunch of reckless, spendathon ideologues in 97 and (like most of my friends) I regret it. Luckily I got through uni just before the fees were tilted again, under Blair, and I look at my friends who were just ONE year behind me at Uni and the mess they're in today...
Labour is and was as much a party for the working man as the GOP in the US is. It's a complete myth; who on earth created this banking disaster? Cameron?! Brown and Blair had a decade under which they let the banks fly off into gay abandon. I know because I was one of the evil bankers...the FSA was an irrelevance under Blair.
They just proved, in the end, what we've always known - Labour cannot run the economy without blowing the bank on dangerous social experiments that some other generation has to pay for.
I was one of the lucky/hard-working kids from a totally working-class family who went to university (one of the top ten, as it happens) and went on to a career in banking as an economist.
What you will get from the smart brigade making you feel stupid is nothing but ideology; they have an agenda, which is a Federal Europe, and they want you to feel that you're a fool for thinking that's dangerous.
They WON'T tell you that the reason Cameron opted out is because Merkel and Sarkozy tried to impose a "London Tax" on the City in order to get some more cash out of us. The City took a thousand years to establish but the EU thinks it has a right to suck more money out of it. It's the envy of Europe.
The cost of our membership is £65 Billion per annum. It is absolute and complete rubbish that we would suffer outside the political apparatus; we signed up to the economic markets, not the political circus Blair pushed us into.
We can EASILY opt out of the Commission etc without losing markets for our goods.
That's the simple truth.
He's a dyed-in-the-wool socialist with no basic understanding of economics (surprise). I'm yet to laugh at his opus of brow-raised toot.
There is no reason why taxpayers should prop up Europe's decadence just because our exporters have failed to grasp the opportunities in developing markets.
LOL. So the fact that UK manufacturing has crumbled is sold as an asset these days? It really takes some drastic myopia....
Spot on. The Greeks are now dealing with the disaster actually forced on them by Germany in the first place. Germany ignored basic directives by the ECB in order to bolster its OWN markets and industry down there on the Rhine.
Now the Frenchman (after a horrifically failed career as French President, I'd add) wants to have one last shot at leadership before he loses the coming French election. He wants to appear tough because he is basically the most unpopular president in the post-war era and a colossal embarrassment to the French electorate, who can't stand him any more.
So he tries to create a tax on the much-envied City of London.
Cameron simply did as the vast majority of British voters expected him to do - stop giving away 65 billion per annum to failing states in the Euro.
Like football brought to a debate wherein it is absurd