Daniel Hannan

Conservatives the world over need to grasp the difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes the two positions happen to coincide; often they don't.

There is sort of a hobbit-like element to a lot of British people. They don't want to be told something until they have worked it out for themselves.

It's not often one gets the chance to write this but, when it comes to the bailouts, especially the euro bailouts, Marxists are right. Working people are being forced to support a privileged few.

Foreign writers - especially Germans - often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory.

I am, 'Guardian' readers keep telling me, a xenophobe. Never mind that I speak French and Spanish, that I love Europe, that I've lived a high proportion of my life abroad. The fact that I oppose the political amalgamation of the European Union's states is ipso facto proof that I dislike foreigners.

I think public life for me has a slightly didactic role, OK.

The populists always fail in their own terms. Let me be more specific, the protectionists always fail. They always end up delivering the sharpest fall in living standards to the people who are their biggest supporters.

In my experience, Eurosceptics are likelier to have lived abroad and to have entered fully into other cultures than Euro-enthusiasts, many of whom seem to have latched on to the E.U. as a way of compensating for their poor language skills.

The further left you are, the more your concern for the underdog crowds out everything else, leading you to overlook inconsistencies. You might, for example, argue for immigration and multiculturalism in the UK, but not in the Amazon. You might demand equality before the law and, at the same time, gender quotas.

Whenever the debate moves on to hard numbers - our deficit with Europe, our surplus with the rest of the world, our Brussels budget contributions, the tiny part of our economy dependent on sales to the EU, the vast part subjected to EU regulation - Euro-enthusiasts quickly shift their ground and start harrumphing about influence.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

On any measure, Spain's bank rescue has been a disaster. A hundred million euros have been added to the national debt, ten-year bonds are at a record high and the country's credit rating has been downgraded three notches.