British Membership: England

England Dept: Cameron made his long-awaited speech promising a referendum on continued British membership in the European Union Wednesday, and he placed the blame squarely on plate tectonics: "People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent.", according to Winnipeg Free Press. The "Little Englander" glories in the notion of England being unencumbered by foreign ties and commitments. It's the kind of nationalism that Americans call "isolationism," and the phrase is now used to describe strongly nationalist, even xenophobic people on the right of English politics. Those people, always present in significant numbers within Cameron's Conservative party, have now won the internal party debate and the real problem is continental drift: Brussels, the capital of the European Union, is getting further and further away from England. Or at least that is British Prime Minister David Cameron's line. The "frustrated" people in question are English, of course. Hostility to the European Union is mainly an English thing, but that matters a lot in the United Kingdom, where 55 million of the kingdom's 65 million people live in England. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.