hms iron duke

hms iron duke

Tuesday 15 November 2011

The Strategic Influence Game 5: A German Europe or a European Germany?

“I have always found the word “Europe” in the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare demand in their own name”.

Otto von Bismarck, German Chancellor, 1871-1890

Alphen, the Netherlands, 15 November. Germany has never found the leadership of Europe easy to attain or to execute. And yet Germany today finds itself the unrivalled leader of the European Union. Can Germany for once get leadership right?

Only at the very 1871 beginning of modern Germany’s uneasy existence was Berlin led by a man who grasped both the possibilities and dangers of German power. The very creation of the then German Empire rocked the rickety European balance of power to its core. And yet somehow Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck steered Germany (relatively) peacefully through a minefield of competing European interests. With his dismissal in 1890 by an unbalanced Kaiser Wilhelm II Germany and Europe began the long slide towards the twin and linked catastrophes of World Wars One and Two.

Today Germany is back. It would be easy to think that the ‘sudden’ emergence of Germany as Europe’s natural leader is a consequence of the Eurozone disaster. In fact Germany has been slowly recovering its position at the centre of European power politics since 1945. And yes power politics still exist in Europe even if masked by the political correctness of Euro-speak. The Eurozone Summit Statement of 26 October simply made German leadership official.

The facts speak for themselves. The 2011 German economy at $3.3 trillion or €2.5 trillion is at least 30% bigger than that of either France or Britain and thanks to reforms in the mid-naughties structurally far more efficient than either. At 81,729,000 the educated German population is again 30% bigger than the two other members of the EU’s so-called ‘Big Three’. Critically, Germany is the world’s second largest exporter with exports accounting for some 33% of national output. For all the current German angst the Euro has been the great German wealth creator. Indeed, Germany’s 2011 trade surplus stands at $20.7 billion or €15.2 billion, some 66% of that exports to its indebted Eurozone partners. Quite simply, the Euro has offset the high cost of German production and created a customs union (Zollverein) for German exports, which was Germany’s 1914 war aim.

So, the EU has done for Germany what two disastrous wars could not, cement Germany as the natural leader of Europe and by extension supplant Britain as the natural European strategic partner of the United States. But here’s the rub; just when Europe needs decisive German leadership Berlin is unable to deliver. Indeed, having gained the power and influence that her political forebears dreamed of not-so-Iron Chancellor Merkel is probably incapable of exercising it either for the good of Germany or Europe.

First, the German Constitution is a direct descendent of the 1948 settlement imposed by the victorious allies upon a defeated Germany. Its very purpose is to prevent the concentration of power in one set of political hands in one Berlin place at any one time. Consequently, Chancellor Merkel possesses nothing like the domestic political authority of either President Sarkozy or Prime Minister Cameron.

Second, the current generation of German leaders are the heirs of a political culture that was so successfully ‘de-nazified’ they still find the concept of German leadership at worst abhorrent or at best uneasy. The whole point of German power is not to have strategic influence, especially of the ‘nasty’ military variety and especially over other Europeans. Germany will thus endeavour to ‘rule’ through the European Commission.

Third, having gained more from the Euro than any other EU member-state the German people are not at all interested in paying to rescue it, demonstrating the limits to their (and Germany’s) ‘Europeanness’. This explains Chancellor Merkel’s reluctance to let the European Central Bank act as the lender of last resort to the Euro-rule-breaking southern Europeans. It also explains her efforts to get countries that have far poorer GDPs per capita to pay for the still-born European Financial Stability Facility.

Equally, there are signs that Germany is slowly re-learning the art of Realpolitik. The opening of the Nordstream gas pipeline last week suggests a new strategic energy relationship with Russia which will concern Central and Eastern European states. The democracy-defying Franco-German presumption of Eurozone leadership suggests that Berlin might be overcoming some of its power reticence. And, the implicit anti-Britishness that has long been a factor in German foreign and security policy has been evidenced by the effective exclusion of the EU member-states with Europe’s strongest financial market from Franco-German leadership of this first order European crisis.

Consequently, Berlin and London are now on collision course.  On 14 November both Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Cameron made speeches calling for fundamental reform of the EU.  However, whilst Merkel called for "...not less Europe, but more" and an overhaul of EU treaties to force fiscal union, Prime Minister Cameron called for the aviodance of "grand plans and utopian visions" and saw the future of the Union as having the "...flexibility of a network, not the rigidity of a bloc".  They meet soon; that should prove interesting. 

For all that history is only so eloquent when considering Germany and Germany’s place in Europe. Berlin’s leadership must therefore be given the benefit of the doubt so long as there is any doubt left about how Germany intends to exercise strategic influence. Germany is no longer ruled by the Kaiser or Hitler and the wars are now but distant memories. Germany is a model European democracy and shows no signs of wavering from a path set for it by the victorious allies.

But the question remains; a German Europe or a European Germany? Berlin will need to work hard to convince ALL Europeans that it knows the politically-correct answer to that most seminal of strategic questions, whatever the temptations for domination afforded by the Eurozone crisis, whatever the democracy-destroying expediency of the moment.

Julian Lindley-French

Saturday 12 November 2011

For the Fallen

London, 11 November, 2011. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year I was in London in silence for two minutes remembering our war dead. I had the honour of addressing the Royal College of Defence Studies on British grand strategy - the organisation of large national means in pursuit of large national ends.

British politician Aneuran Bevan once famously said; “This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.” My message was equally acute; for London to have simultaneously lost critical influence at a critical juncture at one and the same time with its key security partner Washington and its key economic partners via Berlin and Brussels is an act of perverse political genius no less profound.

Too often the British Tommy has paid the ultimate price and made the ultimate sacrifice filling the gap between Britain's ends and means. 1968 was the only year since the eighteenth century that a British serviceman or woman has not been lost on Crown service.  

Therefore, in fitting tribute to them and their comrades I will quote in full Lawrence Binyon::

“With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal, Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, There is music in the midst of desolation, And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known, As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain”.

Julian Lindley-French

Thursday 10 November 2011

Talking Tohoku in Tokyo

“Amateurs talk strategy; professional talk logistics”

General Omar Bradley, 1944

Tokyo, Japan. 10 November. What a city of uber-contrast. A concrete-scape beyond an eye’s leap that crawls and then creeps before eventually soaring and swooping around the old Imperial palace at its heart. This mega-city is periodically punctuated by serene oases of intimate greenery in which water; rock and flora tease the imagination back toward a Japan long gone. Escaping the Eurozone trouble bubble and the shallowness of a London reinventing daily ways to mask its political impotence I have come to a country where tragedy means something.

Tohoku, the hydra-headed disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant catastrophe (not too strong a word) that on 11 March rent apart a swathe of Japanese society. Not the Greek tragedy/farce that passes for disaster in Europe, but a country that this year faced a freak of nature that no human defence could endure. What lessons we Europeans could learn from this great land about civil-military partnership.

The Richter 9-scale earthquake and subsequent 16 metre-high tsunami left 16000 confirmed dead across 3 prefectures, with 4000 still missing, and 20,000 rescued at a financial cost of some $309 billion. The Japanese Self-Defence Force (JSDF) deployed some 107,000 personnel rapidly in support of the civilian authority, some 50% of the force. The JSDF was supported ably by 117,000 US personnel and troops from a host of other regional powers in a model of co-operative large-scale disaster relief.

Strange then that I have just had the honour of addressing the hugely impressive annual International Symposium of the National Institute for Defence Studies (NIDS) about NATO’s failing efforts to make a civil-military partnership ‘work’. Following on from the Vice-Minister of Defence and General Oriki, the man who led the disaster relief, and preceding Brigadier-General Crowe, the Deputy Commander of US Forces, Japan I was struck by how the joint determination to create a “dynamic defence capability” sits in stark contrast to the defeatism and cynicism in European governments and militaries about making civil-military co-operation a reality. And yet, given the gap between forces and resources such synergy remain the future if Europe is to have any chance to influence its security environment. Rather, the petty-minded, strategy-free, process-led little politics of so many European capitals still affords bureaucratic vested interest every opportunity to get very little out of a very limited effort. Looking for a reason for a failure to grip the Eurozone fiasco? Look no further.

However, it was not the big stuff of strategy that I bang on about that made the real difference in Operation Tomodachi. It was a sound system for effective information-sharing supported by responsive logistics – getting the right people, in the right place at the right time. Sure there were failings and lacunae. Effective government and governance in the three North-East Japan prefectures had been to all intents and purpose paralysed. Transportation hubs had been wiped out. The JSDF had to invent a more joint approach to operations on the hoof and closer collaboration with the private sector would have enhanced the effort, not least with the Tokyo Electric Company, owner of the radiation-spewing Fukushima nuclear facility, which for 3 days failed to inform the Prime Minister’s Office of the full extent of the nuclear disaster. And yet the most telling event was the re-opening of tsunami-ravaged Sendai Airport one month after the tragedy opening the way for materiel and personnel to flood in.

Specifically, what came across from all the main speakers was a determination of all the main actors – civilian and military alike – to do whatever was necessary to get the job done. Flexibility, adaptability and creativity were the key. At one point blanket over-flight rights for Australian C-17s was provided simply by adapting tourism laws! The close working relationship between the JSDF and US Pacific Command (PACOM) built up over many years of exercising and joint experimentation was critical because it engendered those all important commodities – solidarity and above all trust.

Looking back at Europe from afar and its faltering efforts to create a meaningful civil-military partnership it is evident that the problem is not technical but as ever political. Nothing is possible in today’s Europe. Everything is too hard and too difficult. Afghanistan is failing, money is but a memory, strategy is but a distant dream. Sadly, I am now watching this malaise affect former advocates of partnership. Many are now slinking away from support fearful that their careers will be blighted by the paucity of strategic and technical ambition that is the stuff of the current crop of political mediocrities who lead us.

Talking tohoku here in Tokyo I am once again convinced that a strong civil-military partnership is central to what passes for European strategic culture and by extension that of NATO. It must be fought for and fought through the current morass of political nothingness that is can’t do Europe today.

Admiral Lord Fisher once famously said, “Gentlemen, there is no more money. Now is the time to think!” It might be worth a try. If you do not believe me, senior commanders, I invite you too to come to Tokyo and talk tohoku. You might learn something.

Julian Lindley-French

Saturday 5 November 2011

Solidarity: The Emptiest Word in Eurospeak

“The British can't understand Europe as they're from an island ... from an island you can't understand the subtleties of the European construction”.

President Nicholas Sarkozy, 4 November, 2011

Alphen, the Netherlands. 5 November. If the mythical European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) contained as many Euros as empty Eurospeak the Eurozone crisis would have been solved in a trice. Indeed, the two most meaningless words in the grand lexicon of Eurospeak are ‘strategy’ and ‘solidarity’ and I have heard more than enough of both over the past two days of G-Plenty. ‘Strategy’ has been so long lost to the bottomless pit of Euro-jargon that it now suffers a new meaning; to not know what to do, where to go or how. My university, Oxford, might wish to consider an Oxford Eurospeak Dictionary to explain to the former European voter the real meaning of such gibberish.

However, the emptiest word by far in Eurospeak is ‘solidarity’. They are at it again. Peter Altmeier, a German MP close to Chancellor Merkel, called on Britain to show ‘solidarity’ with the Eurozone by contributing more British taxpayers to the EFSF, whilst at the same time ruling out more money from the German taxpayer. French President Nicholas Sarkozy was plain insulting to the British in response to a question posed at Cannes by a BBC journalist. “The British can't understand Europe as they're from an island ... from an island you can't understand the subtleties of the European construction”. In Yorkshire, Monsieur le President, someone might call you an arrogant toe-rag for that kind of stupid and prejudiced statement. What we British do understand is rubbish when we hear it! Indeed, it is precisely because we British do understand the ‘subtleties’ of your European ‘construction’ that we are not right now up to our necks (only our elbows) in your mess.

The Germans and French use solidarity a lot; normally when they are defending their national interests to the hilt and often at the expense of we British. Indeed, the one thing that neither France nor Germany have ever offered Britain is solidarity. Germany actively worked against Britain in the early 1990s to force London out of the infamous ‘snake’, the precursor to the Euro at a similar moment of economics-defying politics. Over the past decade neither France nor Germany has shown any solidarity with the British in Afghanistan, with the result that as of this morning 388 British soldiers are dead. Our lads have done too much of the dying for ‘Europe’. But it has been always thus.

What thanks do we get? At the 26 October Eurozone summit Germany and France consigned the British citizen to that of a second-class European citizen through an ‘enhanced’ form of ‘integration’ from which the second biggest paymaster of the EU will be excluded. I think that is what Berlin and Paris call ‘democracy’, the third emptiest and most over-used word in Eurospeak.

So, let us get back to real reality (not the Euro version). The reason that the Eurocrisis is daily deepening is that for too long Eurospeak and the empty politics behind it has polluted economic reality. Germany and France are still trying to solve this crisis politically rather than economically. Eurospeak has thus become the problem as it underpins the alternative reality that created this mess in the first place.

Economic reality is simple; Greece must default and be removed from the Eurozone, supported thereafter by all of us via the IMF; the northern, western European taxpayer (me) must be clobbered so that the EFSF can save Italy and the rest; and the European Central Bank must be empowered to administer my money with the likelihood that more Euros will need to put into the system (I think they call it quantitative printing or ink inflation – something like that). Or, the Euro must fail. As a Dutch taxpayer I can see the train wreck heading towards me but what from what I can see rather than the brake being applied a committee meeting is underway.

Now, as a Briton, I know I am going to have to contribute more in some way because it is in my country’s interest to do so. However, before Britain does indeed contribute more of its own debt to the crisis I would rather like to see a real strategy in place as PR-Meister Cameron is about to announce said increase.  It will be via the IMF and in support of individual Eurozone members and it will cost each British household around about €2000.  And this at a time of real financial suffering.  That is real solidarity M. le President and Mr Altmeier.

My respect for the French and German people remains absolute – my annoyance is not with my fellow European sufferers. Our solidarity is real. The problem is the increasingly dismissive and arrogant European elite. Indeed, if you M. le President really understood ‘solidarity’ and acted in its spirit perhaps you might also better understand the European ‘construction’, as you put it. Maybe solidarity means something different in German and French?

So, if you want our money stop using the silly solidarity word if you do not mean it. We Britons know that when we are in trouble you will of course vanish. And please, M. le President, we know you do not like us, but if you expect us to pay please show a little more respect. We did after all liberate you French twice last century…from the Germans.

Julian Lindley-French

Thursday 3 November 2011

The Strategic Influence Game 4: Utterly Entangled America

"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none." Thomas Jefferson

Alphen, the Netherlands. 3 November. As the G-Plenty and Not-so-Plenty meet in Cannes a big month beckons for the United States. One month hence will be the seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor which brought a formal and abrupt end to 1930s American isolationism. December 2011 will also see the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq. One year hence the US presidential elections will take place. Obama’s first term has been dominated by extracting America from Afghanistan and Iraq and NOT dealing with debt and financial disaster. Obama’s second-term (the presidential candidates on the US Right are hopelessly split and/or less than compelling) will face déjà vu all over again; how to deal with a break-out WMD state in the Middle East. The way in which Washington deals with the coming Iranian Crisis will do much to set American grand strategy on its twenty-first century course.

The International Atomic Energy Authority’s (IAEA) is about to issue a report that Iran is speeding up efforts to enrich weapons-grade uranium.  This will lead to crisis with Israel. It is thus strategic make your mind up time for America – continue as a somewhat less super-power in a constrained leadership role or join its feckless and hopeless European allies in a) global isolationism; and b) selling the family silverware to the dodgy dealers over the horizon to pay for debt obesity.

Strategy is the preserve of the relatively weak. Ten years ago there were a few in Washington (an influential few) who were mad enough to believe that America the Mighty was so strong that strategy need simply be a shopping list of America’s wants in the world. And, whilst Twain-esque reports of America’s strategic demise are hopelessly premature the United States today looks like Britain in 1911 – immensely strong on paper and yet spread thin the world over.

America has been a liberating power, but one that has always and rightly had a keen sense of the national interest. Since 1945 that power has been sustained by a strong sense of internationalism, more often than not supported by European allies the freedom from tyranny of which the US has been the ultimate guarantor. American internationalism has also been sustained by clear economic benefits for the American people. However, something profound has changed that is evident at Cannes; the globalisation which emerged from American free market internationalism is no longer working overwhelmingly in America’s favour.

Furthermore, since 911 American prestige has badly been damaged by two inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although nothing like as costly as World War Two or the Vietnam War this loss of prestige has enabled China to turn economic strength into political influence. Beijing is now on the way to becoming the new peer competitor of America in a new bipolar world. Taken together globalisation and China’s emergence on the crest of an economic bow-wave faces Washington with the most profound of strategic choices; retreat back into a form of neo-isolationism or re-commit to a new form of leadership.

The latter option begs a question; leadership of what? By now Europe should have joined the US in a form of bipolar leadership of the West in the world. Instead, Europe is retreating ever deeper into Euro-isolationism as Germany and France seek ever more incompetent ways not to deal with the Eurozone crisis. Britain? America’s hitherto ‘special relation’ has become a very little ‘power’ retreating from influence both in Europe and the wider world with a fractured society trapped in self-defeating political correctness. What price Europe for the continued commitment of America to Europe’s stability? Japan is a possible partner but is recovering from an enormous natural disaster and twenty years of stagflation. India is being India - non-aligned.

American strategic leadership will thus be far more complex than hitherto making decisive action against Iran very dangerous. Power-shift is the elephant in the room at Cannes. Like it or not the centre of gravity of future American power will be the Asia-Pacific region with the US cast as great stabiliser.  Challenges will be for the mostpart indirect with new and old technologies used to offset American power, often in league with non-state actors, such as Al Qaeda – be it cyber-attack or WMD proliferation. And, the Middle East will continue to boil as the Arab Spring creates as many autocrats as democrats.

Faced with such complexity American leadership could well be an oxymoron with the role of traditional diplomacy ever more important, with coalitions rather than formal alliances being the stuff of American foreign and security policy.  This will in turn require a big shift in the balance between American diplomacy and force. That will be a difficult call for any future American president to make. Political culture, deficit-reduction and pork barrel politics all tend to undermine American soft power. The iron triangle of political funding, defence industries and the armed forces still exerts undue influence in Washington fifty-one years after President Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex.

It was Winston Churchill who said that, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.” Let us hope so. For over sixty years American leaders have more or less ignored Jefferson’s famous dictum to avoid entangling alliances. If America is ever going to heed Jefferson’s warning now is the deficit-ridden, withdrawal moment it is going to happen. Iran will prove the test – pre-empt an Iranian bomb by attacking it; build a political coalition that somehow prevails upon Tehran or simply live with the Iranian bomb and constrain a frightened Israel.

Tough call.

Julian Lindley-French

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Publish, Plagiarise, Pressure...or Perish. What is Wrong with Academia?

Alphen, the Netherlands. 1 November. What is wrong with academia?  Some 30 papers have been corrupted by false data, with at least 14 doctoral theses compromised and 150 papers going back to 2004 now to be investigated. The committee set up by the universities of Tilburg and Groningen, and which published their interim report yesterday, call the scientific fraud “considerable and shocking”. Professor Dr Diederik Stapel, Professor of Cognitive Social Psychology and Dean of Tilburg’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences is today at the centre of a storm that has made headline news on both television and in the newspapers here in the Netherlands. So is my wife for she is the Science Communications Officer of Tilburg University and has had to handle much of the fall-out from what is an all-round failure of academic ethics and rigour. But how isolated a case is this?

In my many years sitting at the cusp between academia and policy the widening gap between the two has made my own posture increasingly uncomfortable. The culture of publish or perish which seems to have been the root cause of Stapel’s alleged corruption has been eating away at academic rigour for years. The literature is now full of meaningless and pointless dross just so that arbitrary publication targets can be met, so that arbitrary funding decisions can be made.  I would not wish to cast aspertions on all my colleagues as there are still some very fine minds at work in academia. However, very few academics now undertake rigorous evidence-based research. The pressure to publish, on both students and academics, is now so great that less than academic tendencies are commonplace.

The number of times I have seen my own work plagiarised is frightening. A few years ago I attended the London launch of a major report on European defence. As I began to read the report my mouth dropped open; the first five pages were lifted directly from a report for the Bertelsmann Stiftung that I had authored. Not surprisingly I complained. Recently a student of mine submitted a paper that contained extensive extracts from one of my own publications with no attempt made to attribute the source. Now, whilst I would not of course question her taste or persipicacity, I did rather question her sanity. Indeed, it was so blatant a case that I simply had the paper re-worked before I would begin to consider it. She seemed to have assumed that because she was paying for the course she had also purchased the assessment. I fear that as universities become ever more desperate for money this kind of ‘misunderstanding’ will only increase.

But it is not over-ambitious students in a hurry that I worry about. From afar the Stapel case reeks of the stink one gets when a profession becomes a closed shop. The professorial ethos of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is everywhere in academia. Professional ‘etiquette’ means that professors very rarely question each other’s work and accept the self-serving and often incomprehensible rubbish that now abounds. This retreat from academic rigour has been reinforced by governments (and notoriously the European Commission) which too often subject universities and think-tanks to project funding. ‘Research’ is only commissioned that provides the answers the paymasters want to hear.

This in turn has tended to reinforce the left and left of centre orthodoxy and political correctness from which every western European university now suffers. All research is political in some form but today too many academics at major universities are in effect self-selected. The congregating of like-minded individuals simply adds to the creeping authoritarianism of political orthodoxy.  If 'reality' is uncovered that suggests an alternative thesis it must be ignored or explained away and its authors sidelined.

However, what has become really insidious is the way professors exploit their students. There is some evidence in the report that Stapel intimidated his students into accepting his corrupt data for years until a few of them were brave enough to speak out. I can imagine just how he got away with this. Too many professors behave like medieval aristocrats; insisting that they are above supervision, handing out patronage by hinting at future careers if students agree to undertake huge amounts of work; and ‘authoring’ subsequent publications which in reality are the fruits of others' labours. So many professorial publications are in fact written by others, only for the 'other' then to be discarded when it suits and left broken in the self-obsessed professorial wake. Burnt out careers and broken people are everywhere in academia. The whole system simply encourages the self-obsessed, the ego-maniac and the downright unfair.

Professor Stapel deserves all he will get for the damage he has done to a lot of promising young people. However, I hope, just hope, that the academic gods will also hold a mirror up to themselves, both here in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Stapel is almost certainly the tip of a very grubby iceberg.

Publish, plagiarise, pressure...or perish. Academia needs a re-think.  It could start by awarding a medal to those brave students who had the courage to uncover this fraud.

Professor Dr Julian Lindley-French

Saturday 29 October 2011

No Taxation Without Representation!

"London is the centre of financial services in Europe. It's under constant attack through Brussels directives. It's an area of concern, it's a key national interest that we need to defend."


Prime Minister David Cameron, 29 October, 2011

The 26 October, 2011 Euro Summit Statement and the decision by the seventeen Eurozone countries to move towards ever deeper economic and fiscal integration will make Britain and the British people third or fourth class European citizens, after the likes of Belgium and Luxembourg. For the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy and Europe’s strongest military power Britain’s status in the EU was changed overnight from being one of the Big Three in an essentially inter-governmental structure, to being shut out of a German-led integrated system. To force the British people to go on paying for something with which the overwhelming majority of them do not agree with and for which they gain little or no benefit would be to subject a proud, old country to humiliation. That is not going to happen.

Figures supplied by Britain’s Office for National Statistics capture the extent of the unfairness to which Britain is now subject by its European partners. Britain is the second largest net contributor after Germany having injected some €10.5 billion in the EU in 2010. Britain’s gross contribution is also second to that of Germany at €22.4 billion, having leaped 74% since 2009. Some warn that Britain’s trade with Europe could be damaged if Britain left the EU, with some 40% of exports going to the EU. In fact, in 2010 Britain ran an enormous trade deficit with the EU of €53.1 billion, compared with a trade surplus of €11.7 billion with the rest of the world.  The average British household now pays around three hundred euros per year to the EU, which for many is close to the monthly cost of keeping a roof over their head.

The Eurozone breakout of 26 October was thus more than a technical decision to save the Euro. It saw the beginning of a fundamental shift of power inside the EU in favour of Germany and the European Commission. This power shift is manifested by French and German-inspired attacks on the City of London by the European Commission, Britain most important strategic economic asset.  Berlin and Paris are moving to strengthen both Frankfurt and Paris as financial centres at London’s expense. Prime Minister David Cameron warned on 29 October, 2011 that the City of London is under constant attack from EU. He described Britain’s finance industry as a “key national interest”, and warned that the single market must be kept open to non-Eurozone members.

Cameron went on, “Sometimes it’s necessary to have regulation but the regulation is badly drafted, badly formed and it doesn’t necessarily reflect what large financial centres like London need. And, of course, all countries in Europe pursue their national interests. Would the French and Germans like a larger share of financial services in Paris and Frankfurt? Of course they would. I want to make sure we keep them in London”.

Specifically, Cameron is deeply concerned about proposals from the European Commission which are supported by France and Germany which would impose a tax on all financial transactions in the EU to help fund the way out of the Eurozone crisis. Not only would this hinder London’s ability to compete with other global financial markets such as New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo but it would effectively mean that the British were contributing 80% to tax to cover debt in a Eurozone of which they are not a member.

The power shift implicit in the Statement is truly historic and historians will come to see it thus. Germany is about to win the 140 year systemic struggle for the domination of Europe.  Given Berlin is the big winner the Germans should perhaps not complain too loudly about the price for solving the crisis as the Euro has done so much for so long to fuel Germany’s export-led growth.  The single currency has in effect acted as a customs union built around Germany thus offsetting the high costs of German production.

Equally, London also has responsibility for the position in which it finds itself. Ever since joining what was then the European Economic Community (EEC) back in 1973 London sold ‘Europe’ to its people as a free-trade zone and nothing more. Indeed, Britain has been trying to hold back the development of a more political and social Europe ever since. In ever more desperate attempts to reconcile what was promised to the British people with the political moves in Europe towards deeper integration London has sought opt-outs, which has simply removed Britain ever further from decision-making in Europe. ‘Brussels’ is now an utterly hated word across much of Britain and unfairly so. Ironically, the most important opt-out was the decision not to join the Euro for the simple fact that Britain was right about the inherent contradictions in the structure of the currency driven as it was by political ambition rather than sound economic fundamentals.

So, where can the British go? In fact Britain remains one of the world’s most advanced economies and by dint of being outside the Euro has better prepared itself for the globalised market than any of the Eurozone countries. Indeed, the Eurozone crisis is the world’s first globalisation crisis of the developed world caused precisely because the Eurozone tried and failed to seal itself off from the consequences of globalisation. It is no coincidence that David Cameron spent the period immediately after the Eurozone summit in Australia with the leaders of the Commonwealth amongst the fifty-three members of which are some of the world’s up and coming economies, most notably India.

And then of course there is the Anglosphere. Ten years of bruising engagements by the British military in Iraq and Afghanistan has seen some eight hundred British soldiers killed and some three thousand badly wounded. It has also demonstrated to the British that when it comes to real danger for all the talk of European defence London can expect little solidarity from its European partners. Family are the only ones that can be trusted; America, Australia, Canada amongst others. The British have done too much of the dying for Europe these ten years past. Libya? Too little, too late and it is seen by many in London merely as a vehicle for re-election seeking President Sarkozy to grandstand. There may even be benefits for both sides as a Europe without Britain can finally get on and do what it pretends it has always wanted, but which it also pretends the British have always frustrated, not least a common defence policy.

No Taxation Without Representation was first used in the run up to the American Revolution against Britain by Reverend Jonathan Mayhew in 1750 Boston. James Otis then said that "taxation without representation is tyranny”. What was right in 1750 remains just as right in 2011.

The day will now come when Britain leaves the EU and it will be perhaps the saddest day of my life.

Julian Lindley-French