Germany is easing Britain out of the EU

The blogs have the story.   Germany is easing Britain out of the EU. What will it mean for British manufacturers?  Will trade be made more difficult for British sellers into the EU, and will importing from the EU become more bureaucratic?   It seems unlikely that Germany would want to harm her own exports by raising tariff or other barriers to British exporters.  Yet politics is a funny game, and Germany might decide to make trading more onerous to teach Britain a lesson for not rushing to join the Euro, and bow down to Berlin.  It is Angela Merkel who is easing Britain out of the EU, not Conservative backbenchers as The Sun suggests. People sourcing jewellery from the EU might find that in future it pays to keep more suppliers inside our own borders. Media: Britain on the way out? Richard North, 05/11/2012   on www.eurefendum.com With his infinite capacity for getting it wrong, doyen of the Westminster lobby, Tevor Kavanagh, is sounding off about a subject of which he knows vanishingly little – EU politics. The Great Ego has finally sussed that there is something amiss in this department, and with a characteristically small-minded approach to the subject, displays the Germanophobia always just under the surface with his breed. "David Cameron", he writes, "should tell Germany's Angela Merkel the truth at talks in Downing Street this week – Britain is on its way OUT of Europe", then adding, "The Iron Chancellor may think she has ways of making Britain salute the EU flag, but her host has lost the power to do so". One dreads to think what contagion he might have picked up had he read this blog, but slumming it is not Kavanagh's style. Had he done so last June (below), he might have seen that the situation is exactly the reverse of what he paints. It is Merkel who is easing the UK out of the EU, and Mr Cameron who is struggling to stay in.  Similarly, The Great Ego misreads the "rebellion" of the 53 Tories who "joined shifty Labour to demand a CUT in Brussels' bloated budget". This, Kavanagh decides, was "an irreversible turning point — not just for Mr Cameron, but also for Britain as a sovereign nation state". From now on, he says, "no Prime Minister, Tory or Labour, can quell the head of steam building across all parties for an in/out referendum".  For once, though, I agree with Andrew Rawnsley of the loss-making Observer, on one point at least, when he brands the rebellion as "completely bogus". It is not real and neither will it achieve anything of substance. In a way, though, it doesn't really matter what Kavanagh writes, or what Sun readers think. The newspaper was once a power in the land, but on this issue it is so far behind the curve that its wailing no longer has any relevance. Our fate, to a very great extent, is being decided in Berlin, but not in the way that Kavanagh thinks.