VERY WELL - ALONE!

So, Europe has at the last moment been sufficiently scared to take on the might of the bankers and the widespread corruption of some governments, and draw back from the brink of financial disaster with the only plan of rescue that would seem to have the slightest chance of success.

And Britain? We have stood aside yet again, and missed yet another chance of becoming at last an integral part of the continent to which we so obviously belong. To please whom? Well, there are the London bankers, whose inordinate greed has contributed to our own internal shudder, and who must still be allowed to rob the till. But above all there are the die-hard Tory back-benchers, who can be seen alive on TV crying for the government to adopt a 'bulldog' attitude to the insidious attempts by the Germans and French and other untrustworthy ethnicities to infiltrate the perfection of the British way of life.

Perhaps they have a muddled awareness of the spirit of the war-time cartoon at the time of Dunkirk, and ache to do an imitation Churchill act. But Churchill for all his quirks was a man of true greatness, operating at a time of our near-extinction, and their cardboard cut-out histrionics ring flat. Little Englanders to a man.

Another echo from the past: 'I took my harp to a party, but nobody asked me to play....They might have said Play us a tune we can sing, but somehow I don't think they noticed the thing......' Ah, the ancient folk-wisdom of the music-halls.