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Now that David Cameron has walked away from closer European integration, comments in the British press have begun to fall. For Guardianreporter Michael White, “this is a very scary day”:
… it looks like the Big One, the moment when a government in London exercised the famous British veto on an important EU matter and withdraws to the margins of the European Union, thus ending 50 years of more-or-less consistent policy.
Britain, he argues, has withdrawn back to the “splendid isolation” it celebrated as an empire in the 19th century. “So is today's isolation splendid or miserable? Is it better or for worse?”:
Yet I do not hear the sound of champagne corks or celebration among British Eurosceptics. Beware of what you wish for, is a wise saying. Who knows what happens now? But Europe, for all its follies and failings, has become a scapegoat for weaknesses that are really our own. We may be about to rediscover that awkward truth. It was why we joined in the first place.
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