Angela Merkel is running out of nice things to say about David Cameron and the Tory rebels who are dictating his European policy. Der Spiegel magazine recently compared the British to ‘at best spectators in the gallery like Statler and Waldorf, the two old men on The Muppet Show’. This was apparently after a briefing from Merkel’s office.
If she thinks the Tories are bad, the public are much worse. Over the summer, the European Commission asked 32,000 people across the continent what they thought about the EU. The Poles are still enthusiastic, the austerity-stricken Irish less so. The Italians are smarting from having lost their prime minister and the Greeks are a bit raw over the sado-austerity. But the most hostile EU member state, by a clear margin, is Britain. Barely a third of us regard EU membership as a benefit and just one in six of us take a ‘positive view’ of it.
As Merkel will know, there is only so long a democracy can be kept in a club against the wishes of its people.
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