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The rationale for Europe in the 21st century is stronger than it has ever been. It is essentially about power, not about peace anymore.

here is a very strong and very vocal minority however. Basically, it's an old fashioned form of nationalism. That's what the UK Independence Party is, and it carries with it a very old fashioned set of attitudes and arguments.

Option three is pragmatic and careful (quite Tory, really): if major changes emerge in Europe in the next five years that shift the balance of power, then a referendum comes on to the agenda. If not, it doesn’t. That is the course that the party leadership has taken, and quite right they are, too.

Britain, whose intelligence cooperation with America is probably uniquely deep in the history of the world,

Indeed, it is no accident that the greatest trust in the intelligence world is that between Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – sometimes known in this field as the Five Eyes. This exists because of a common experience of kinship, language, war and living under law-based liberty. It is emphatically not the product of untrammelled state power, but of a culture that knows that its eyes (five pairs being better than one) need to scan the horizon to stay free.