Cameron's EU veto plunges UK into its own euro crisis

With his veto at the EU summit a week ago British Prime Minister David Cameron has left himself isolated and in a very tight spot, the liberal weekly The Economist fears: "Mr Sarkozy, who is facing a tough re-election fight next spring, claimed that Mr Cameron wanted to make the City of London into something like the Cayman Islands. A frequent British ally, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte grumbled about Britain seeking an 'unacceptable' competitive advantage. Combine such forces and it is possible to imagine Mr Cameron's government trapped, unwillingly, between an impossible piece of hostile Euro-legislation, domestic British anger and unstoppable pressure for a referendum that cannot be won. Whatever Westminster sophisticates murmur, the politics of this crisis are moving into new territory. Britain's relations with Europe are now inseparable from how, and whether, the euro survives. That is the real lesson of the fractious Brussels summit. What happens next may test not just the government's powers of diplomacy, but of imagination itself."

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