The crisis in the eurozone gives Britain the chance to refashion the EU as a looser union, David Cameron said on Monday, after Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said that she wanted substantial treaty change to strengthen it and give the European commission the chance to impose fiscal discipline on excessively indebted states in the single currency area.
Speaking at the lord mayor's banquet in London, Cameron, describing himself as a sceptic, hailed the collapse of the old assumption that power within the EU could only flow from the nation states to Brussels and EU membership could only lead to ever closer union.
Merkel had earlier described the crisis as probably Europe's toughest hour since the second world war, but again spurned UK proposals for a Eurobond or for the European central bank to become lender of last resort to prop up the euro.
Cameron is due to travel to Berlin at the end of this week both to urge Merkel to make the ECB more interventionist and to set out what the UK will seek to safeguard and change in the event of treaty change being sought by Germany. » | Patrick Wintour, political editor | Monday, November 14, 2011
