EU-UK Ties at a Breaking Point

Beyond the predictable tedious horror of this week's EU budget summit, which starts tomorrow, what is the best Europe we can hope for over the next few years? There's an awful symmetry between the answers given by British Eurosceptics and continental Europhiles. Both pose a binary choice: either Britain follows Germany and France in a drive for "more Europe", or Britain stands further apart. Fed up to the back teeth with each other, both sides are close to the point when they are ready to say: "Very well, alone." You go your way, we go ours. And both are wrong. If there were more political imagination on both sides of the Channel, we would work towards a Europe that has not one hard core but at least two. Germany, France and other eurozone countries have to deepen their monetary union, with a banking union and elements of a fiscal – and consequently political – union. For the foreseeable future Britain will not be part of it. It does not follow that the eurozone must be the hard core of everything the EU does. Why should it be?