Daily Telegraph discovers EU

No-one could accuse the Daily Telegraph of being pro-EU, and yet this morning Britain’s conservative daily of reference has announced that in the coming fortnight it plans to “examine whether the EU works, what Britain gets out of it and what sort of a relationship we want with the peoples and cultures of Europe.” First off the mark is an editorial with the shock opening sentence “The European Union has many benefits for Britain” that notes that the UK is only behind Germany as the EU largest net contributor, while a report offers more traditional Telegraph fare in revealing that EU spends vast amounts of taxpayers’ money on dubious projects such as “£1.4 million (€1.6 million) on a programme to "define God", more than £87,000 (€99,000) on a fake silkworm-breeding business and £750,000 (€853,000) on a crocodile zoo.” Elsewhere, Adrian Michaels extols the benefits of unrestricted freedom of travel within the European space, this complemented by a EU timeline, a YouGov pollon attitudes to the Lisbon Treaty, and a series of first hand accounts on the European experience entitled “My Europe”. All in all, much food for thought for David Cameron’s Conservative party on an issue which, as the Telegraph notes, “has been the deepest fissure in British politics for almost 50 years”.