The Dunkirk spirit eh? Tell the bulldog to put his teeth back in!

The Guardian seems to be overstating the case a bit :

Initially 23 of the 27 EU countries said they would ignore the British veto and negotiate a new pact outside the treaty. Later the other three waverers said they would take the agreement to their own parliaments, leaving the UK on its own.

What are the odds on the Swedish, Hungarian and Czech parliaments all approving the intergovernmental fudge?

The disturbing bit is Cameron's apparent dog-in-the-manger determination to bloc

Cameron acknowledged there were risks in striking out alone. But he said Britain would protect its position by insisting that the institutions of the EU could not be used to enforce the new fiscal rules.

"While there were always dangers of agreeing a treaty within a treaty, there are also risks with others going off and forming a separate treaty. So we will insist that the EU institutions - the court, the commission - that they work for all 27 nations of the EU. Indeed those institutions are established by the treaty and that treaty is still protected."

Cameron indicated that Britain may go further and block the use of EU institutions if eurozone countries club together to shape financial regulations and labour laws.

The institutional solution would presumably be for EU organisations to have a dual legal definition, and any meeting which dealt with Eurozone business would reconvene in its "EU minus UK" configuration, sending the UK representative out for a smoke.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}