BBC News
December 9, 2011
We had been kidding ourselves. It always felt, when you covered a Brussels summit, that Britain was there on sufferance, but the rules said otherwise: technically we were and are an equal member of a 27-nation union whose oft-explained "three pillars" of governance were applied for the common good.
Now, as is clear from Thursday night's summit statement, these common institutions are to oversee a selective "fiscal compact".
The European Commission (which the UK sits on) and the parliament (which it sits in) will adorn the architecture of a strategic economic compact which the UK is excluded from. That is the problem Prime Minister David Cameron had to confront last night.
Now there is a two-speed Europe and in order not to give up sovereignty Britain had to give up power. The long term impact is not calculable: it depends on whether the smaller, 17+ pact of euro countries, can save the single currency, avoid a slide into default and break-up, and find a way out of perpetual deflation, social unrest and poverty for the five peripheral countries.
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