Amidst all the hoo-ha about the Eurozone (the most dramatic and gripping news story for years; by turns horrifying, fascinating, infuriating and funny), the press seems to have forgotten what a twist its knickers got into at the end of last year, when, in mid-December, David Cameron announced he wasn't going to sign the EU bail-out treaty. How the media squealed - the Tory right that at last we were sticking it to the Eurocrats, and the liberal Left that we were isolating ourselves unnecessarily.
Six months on, how do these reactions look? Compromised on both sides. To the chagrin of the Torygraph we are still handing money over to help prop up a single currency which they said, correctly, would not work.
But it's the Left which got it thoroughly wrong. Will Hutton, writing at the time in Guardian, described Cameron's refusal as an act of "crass stupidity". Jonathan Freedland, a couple of days earlier, wrote that as a result "Europe is advancing towards its integrated destiny, with Britain in its rear-view mirror. The two-speed Europe has arrived, with Britain in a slow lane of one." Again in the Guardian, John Harris seemed to be on a broader highway: "So, look where we find ourselves: crawling along in the slow lane of a newly three-speed Europe, with no clear idea of where we might be going."
This on the other hand is what I wrote about the treaty (on 11 December 2011):
"It contains fiscal rules which will not be obeyed, attempts to impose austerity measures which will make even less likely that countries will be able to grow their way out of trouble (and which there are now some signs that electorates of individual countries won't accept), makes no provision for transfers between rich and poor regions of the EU and does nothing to make the ECB a lender of last resort."
And look what has happened to the treaty now. France saw that the perpetual austerity it imposed was poisonous, kicked out its president and elected another on a pledge to renegotiate. The Dutch government collapsed for similar reasons. Spain has mass unemployment and a run on the banks because of its attempts to toe the Eurozone line. Greece is within a whisker of exit from the currency because its people cannot decide whether they are willing to accept the strictures of austerity.
Actually the treaty has revealed Eurozone leaders to be naive and economically illiterate - it does nothing to address the currency imbalances at the heart of the crisis, and tries to impose on member states indefinite recession which their people will not tolerate.
There are two ways out of the mess, debt mutualisation by way of Eurobonds, or massive QE. Since the latter will be marginally more acceptable to the German electorate, that's probably the course Mrs Merkel will eventually agree. Although it will probably happen only after minds have been concentrated by Greece's departure.
Cameron was right not to sign, and I have seen not one word from his critics acknowledging that his refusal has been vindicated.
Ah, I hear you say, but Cameron didn't refuse because he thought the economics of the treaty wouldn't work. He refused because he didn't want a Europe-wide transaction tax. Perhaps. But that isn't my point. Cameron was criticised because refusing to sign would, his critics claimed, isolate us. But this has not happened to Britain, or if it has I haven't noticed; and it doesn't seem to have deterred France, Holland or Spain from trying to get the treaty changed. The inexorable logic of the liberal press is that we should sign any treaty the EU wants, simply on the basis that if we don't no-one will listen to us any more.
And there's something else. The history of the Euro, from its inception to its precarious present (for all the world like a giant volcano waiting to go off), is one of pious hopes, naive economics, hard choices deferred and naked national self-interest. The disadvantage of isolation from such a gathering is what exactly?
I am not viscerally anti EU. I am all for free trade and being nice to one another. But there is a limit to all things, and economic union is not possible without a forcible watering down of national identities, cultural, economic, political and linguistic, which, personally, I rather like. In particular the Euro, which was supposed to make its participants prosperous, has only served to make some of them very prosperous and some stony broke.
John Harris concluded his Guardian article by quoting Orwell thus: "The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time".
Of course Orwell is right about very nearly everything; but he didn't live to see the Euro, and with his characteristic intellectual fearlessness I am sure he would have concluded that in this case it is foreigners who didn't take us seriously; and look what a price they are paying for their mistake.
