BATTLES LOST ON THE PLAYING FIELDS OF ETON

Although "the famous quote attributed to Wellington" - "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton" - "was probably apocryphal" according to Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_in_popular_culture - David Cameron might like to reflect on whether his defeat in Europe yesterday was lost in the same place.

For our prime minister seems to lack a fundamental grasp of the history of the so-called European Project, which his predecessor Margaret Thatcher actually understood much better. As I pointed out in a post of last year - http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-iron-ladies-thatcher-and-merkel.html - whilst Mr Cameron "may privately regard himself as "the Heir to Blair", it is surely the German Chancellor who is heiress of the original "Iron Lady's" drive for democratic liberation of the former Communist Europe where Angela Merkel spent her earlier life..." 

Thus the most significant event in Europe yesterday was not the UK's failure to influence the appointment of the next President of the European Commission, but the signing of a trade agreement between the European Union, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28052645 Moreover, without wishing to appear politically incorrect or incite old enmities, the concept of so-called "Lebensraum" or "Living Space" - http://www.historytoday.com/martyn-housden/lebensraum-policy-or-rhetoric - has always been an important aspect of Greater European Politics, something Russian President Vladimir Putin knows only too well.

Yet the prime minister and his government seem to have no grasp of wider European geo-politics at all. The fact is that the EU can well afford to lose Britain in the long term because the Ukraine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine - as the largest country in Europe, and one of the few places in the world with surplus agricultural land resources, represents "Lebensraum". Although use of this expression  may be construed as anti-German, British colonial expansion was also strongly motivated by the political aim of increasing land and other natural resources available to a small nation state.

With this in mind, Mr Cameron might like to reflect on last week's figures from the Office of National Statistics which saw the UK population increase by the size of Scotland's, or about 5 million people, in the period between 2001-2013 - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2670751/Number-people-UK-smashes-64million-one-biggest-population-increases-Europe.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 - together with a report by the University of Cambridge and the National Farmer's union which identifies a "significant" shortage of UK farmland by 2030: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28003435

When I attended a Welsh comprehensive school in the 1970s, both "Lebensraum" (which I studied for my history O level) and Malthus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus - whom I studied as part of my geography A level, were fairly key curriculum subjects. I do sometimes wonder what Mr Cameron and his friends learnt at school, apart from how to advance their own careers. However, this problem of the British elite is not new, as George Orwell, also an Eton school boy, wrote: "Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."