15 Jan 2014

‘Who are you to lecture us?’ How France and Germany view Britain

Think of Europe as the recovery ward of a large, somewhat ramshackle hospital. The Greeks, Spaniards and Italians have just come out of intensive care. They have a pulse but they are still very frail.

The French should be keeping serious bed rest. Some doctors even believe they should be back in intensive care thanks to some renal complications, but they keep getting up to boss around the nursing staff and complain about the food.

The Germans have been well enough for years now to inherit some nursing duties and they have even started dishing out pills and issuing medical guidelines.

The hospital is hopelessly understaffed. But some of the other patients have been grumbling and complaining about German high handedness.

The British patient is in a private room, where he was been put because he was talking, even raving, in his sleep. He also wanted to be by himself. “A bit of a loner”, the other patients complained, wondering out loud whether Britain should really be transferred to a different hospital altogether.

The British patient couldn’t agree more, raising the possibility of a transfer. But now the patient in the single room at the end of the corridor feels much more robust than this time least year.

He swears that his special medication is working wonders after all and he has sidled into the centre of the ward near the water cooler to tell all the others where they have gone wrong, and how they need to purge their bodies or perish.

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Eyebrows have been raised. France was heard muttering an obscenity. That is essentially how George Osborne’s “reform or perish” speech on Europe will be received in Paris or Berlin. Who are you to lecture us?

Ironically the Germans agree with him on the need for reform. As the principal paymasters of the eurozone, they would love to see some of the spending curtailed. It appeals to Germany’s financially cautious voters.

But over the last few years they have learned to distrust Britain’s motives on Europe. As one German friend put it to me: “They want to dictate the rules of football to us when they are actually playing rugby!”

Angela Merkel and David Cameron genuinely like each other. Their centre-right political instincts chime with each other. But she distrusts his politics because so much of them are geared towards appeasing the fractious Euro-sceptic wing of his party.

She thinks it is undignified to allow Ukip to set the agenda or dictate the political tone. That is why the British patient may not be taken as seriously as he would like and will shuffle back to his room.

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