Tory backbenchers are wondering whether the government “actually has a policy on Europe”, says Iain Martin in The Daily Telegraph. Rather than “standing on the sidelines”, David Cameron should be offering to lead the ten countries that remain outside the euro to ensure we’re not “disadvantaged by the treaty changes that attempts at integration will require. We should also be putting down markers for a future renegotiation of our relationship with the EU.” But if the eurozone fails, “banking systems would collapse, credit would dry up, and world trade would go into free fall”, says Jeremy Warner, also in the Telegraph. That is why the Tory leadership is supporting efforts to hold it together “through gritted teeth”.
Cameron has put himself at odds with his europhile deputy Nick Clegg by casting himself as a ‘sceptic’, says James Chapman in the Daily Mail, vowing to “refashion the EU so it better serves the nation’s interests” and attacking its “pointless interference, rules and regulations”. These words are in stark contrast with those of German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has called for the EU to “complete economic and monetary union, and build political union”, saying that “if the euro fails, then Europe will fail”.
The “unravelling of the euro” doesn’t mean that the Tory eurosceptics were right all along, says Peter Wilby in The Guardian. “Their ideal is a Europe of free trade and zero government”, but free trade agreements “always involve a progressive loss of sovereignty”. They can’t survive if one or more participants feels others are taking unfair advantage, through, say, government subsidies. The world’s supranational organisations should draw up rules to let countries “re-introduce limited tariffs and opt out of regulations” if there is enough domestic support to do so. “It may sound impossible but so, in the 1940s, did global free trade.”