CRUSHING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AGAIN IS HARDLY GLOATWORTHY AT THIS POINT:

That leads us to the cruel doctrines of the modern era. Their perpetrators also thought that they were in the salvation business, not of souls but of mankind. This started with the French Revolution. Re-make the world, re-make humanity: outcome, the Terror. The Marxists took over the same agenda, and ended with a vastly greater terror. Then there was Apartheid. There is a common illusion that it was invented by Afrikaner policemen with size 13 boots. Not so: Apartheid was a product of the universities. Dr Verwoerd was a professor of sociology. Only intellectuals could have created such an absurd doctrine, so incompatible with the demographic facts.

With the European single currency, there is a similar syndrome. After 1945, a European political elite concluded that the continent had to move beyond the nation states, whose wars had almost destroyed it. That was neither an immoral response nor a foolish one.

But there were two difficulties. The first was the democratic deficit. If you decided to build a new Europe, it would help if the peoples of the old Europe were with you.

If the European public had been prepared to embrace the inevitable disruption and sacrifice while they transferred their allegiance to the Twelve Stars, it could have worked. They were never asked. Those who thought that they knew best just carried on with their federalising plots.

As they ignored the data, they also overlooked the second difficulty. To an extent inconceivable in 1945, old Europe recovered. The inhabitants of the nation states prospered, especially in the North. As most modern politicians have come to recognise, prosperous people do not like paying tax, even to subsidise their own country's less-well-off. When the money would go to other countries, the reluctance is compounded. So it would appear that the eurozone can neither go forward, nor backwards, nor stay the same. It almost seems as if the federasts have created a problem that is beyond the power of the human mind to solve.

In that case, what should Britain do? David Cameron has one problem: he cannot tell the truth. It must be so tempting to say: "We told you so. You have behaved with asinine stupidity. The only hope is to abandon the whole project, now." But it would sound like gloating. Mr Sarkozy would become even more hysterical.

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