Our politicians need to look beyond Europe

In Britain, public sector strikes always bring with them the whiff of national decline. They are a reminder of a time when the country was becoming less and less competitive and the civil service regarded its job as the management of decline, a mindset only broken by the Thatcher government.
 
But today Britain faces a choice almost as acute as the one it faced in the late 1970s. Is this country content with declining slightly less quickly than the continent of Europe as a whole, or does it want to equip itself for a new world in which economic power is moving east?
 
It is in this context that the debate about the EU needs to be seen. There are, as I say in the political column this week, far too many people in Whitehall who take false comfort from the fact that Britain is the best in Europe at this or that.