Ramesh, that’s well said on Spain. Here’s an excellent piece by Iain Murray on the Spanish vote. It’s well worth reading, although he’s too sanguine about the situation in the UK.. While it’s true (as he says) that British voters remain a long way from ‘Old Europe’, the same is not true of the British government. Recent months have seen an embarrassingly naive attempt by Tony Blair to establish the UK, along with France and Germany as a sort of governing troika for the EU, an initiative that is as pointless (the EU will continue to be run by and for Brussels’ bureaucratic class and, to a lesser extent, France and Germany) as it is counterproductive (it will make New Europe believe that the UK is not a reliable ally). Worse still, Spain’s defection to Old Europe has greatly increased the chance that the proposed EU ‘constitution’ will go through, a development almost guaranteed to ensure a greater distance between UK and US foreign policy.