Genuinely superb column by Mary Riddell in the Telegraph today. Read in full. Considering the Telegraph’s decades of hostility to the EU (it’s the paper that employs the hard anti-EU Tory Tea Partier Dan Hannan, after all, and owners the Barclay brothers have been linked by some reports to UKIP), the tone and argument is little short of astonishing.

Highlights:

“Britain – so recently the buccaneer of the world – has become insular to the point of agoraphobia. Recession and hardship at home have made the UK a nation of political navel-gazers…

“inward-looking politics are bolstering, rather than reducing, Britain’s identity crisis. With power ebbing away abroad and the spectre of Scottish independence at home, Britons are wondering: who are we?

“… The immigrant has become the convenient scapegoat for politicians’ failures to maintain the wages and build the homes that citizens rightly demand. Just as insidiously, the EU has become a byword for the ills afflicting Britain when the truth – too dangerous for most politicians to air – is that it is the only antidote.”