The view from Davos: Cameron’s mad to talk about leaving the EU

‘Cameron’s speech on Europe is badly timed; we must stop this endless European bickering when facing such huge worldwide political challenges’.  That’s the view of Neil Selby, the London-based Director of Executive Education for the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business but who at the moment is, like me, here in Davos. ‘Let’s think instead of the links we can make with East Asia’, he tells me.

It’s very disconcerting: while in Britain most columnists and commentators seem to be congratulating Cameron on his big Europe speech, here at Davos there’s no enthusiasm. Most of the people around me think the emphasis was all wrong.

At a lunch on East vs. West; Re-Shaping the World, hosted by Clifford Chance, Stephen King, the Group Chief Economist at HSBC, insisted we should look beyond Europe. Britain needs to focus on Asia and Latin America, he told me: ‘We have become even more integrated with the rest of Europe than Germany, France or Italy; they’ve traded further afield.’