EU must be reformed for all of Europe - Britain challenges a behemoth

As British prime minister David Cameron struggles to win concessions that might placate, or quell for a time at least, Tory eurosceptics, he is faced with 27 national leaders growing weary of Britain’s demands for concessions and licence to avoid core EU commitments. 

To resolve a Tory family row, Mr Cameron wants to sideline basic tenets such as the free movement of people — especially workers — and provisions designed to protect immigrants or welfare dependents.

Though Britain’s eurosceptics, just like most sentient Europeans, have valid concerns around how the federation, the community, the slightly united states of Europe, call it what you will, is evolving, it is hard to imagine that their objections would have become an in-or-out ultimatum without the Old English Mustard legacy of the kind of jingoism that once made the map of the world so very red for more than two centuries. So many of the ‘Leave’ arguments seem as if they could be articulated by an ambitious subaltern embittered by his experiences, and the massacre of the great majority of his colleagues, in the 1841 First Afghan War rather than the kind of response the statesmen who tried to rebuild Europe after the Second World War realised was necessary.