Cameron had no choice but to take the action he took because of Merkel's insistence that a Tobin tax be applied to transactions passing through the City of London.
It could not have been outside of her knowledge that Sweden tried a unilateral imposition of a Tobin tax back in the 1980's and it was a total disaster which saw their domestic transactional business vanish abroad and with a reduced tax take through Capital Gains tax and almost none from the Tobin tax they had to stem the loss of tax by abandoning Tobin Tax.
It has been tried once on a unilateral basis and was a disaster. It would be again unless globally enforced and as we are unique within Europe as having a global exchange through which flows about a trillion a day in Forex trading, we were uniquely expected to kill our goose which lays the golden eggs.
I have a 100% belief that it would have destroyed the City of London as a major hub for financial transactions and with it would have gone a substantial number of the 1.3 million jobs in the finance area of the City and the 11% of the entire tax take to our exchequer,.
The Tobin tax is designed to curb and destroy speculative trading and can only be implemented if universal or it is a certainty that the business from which we reap so much will go elsewhere.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/workin...7_en.htm#chap3
Cameron was made an offer he had to refuse and IMO it was a political manoeuvre to sideline the UK. If all the others including Germany added their collective bourses and exchanges together they are totally insignificant compared to London in the global world of trading so what others were not concerned about hardly affected them at all and in many cases not at all.
That ploy was to get us out and for no other purpose and now that mission is accomplished I would not be surprised if the Tobin tax as to be applied to Europe isn't a long time, maybe never in coming. Eurex trading futures on German indices has been a long term rival to Liffe (trading futures on UK indices) but even though the are minuscule compared the to Forex flow through London I cannot somehow see Germany killing off Eurex.
Amid the double dealing and back stabbing approach within European politics there is an element that I read about frequently over the past few months. European leaders appear to wish to ignore the fact that Europe is inherently a flawed concept and wish to apply the blame for their dilemma on the contagion of debt problems of which we via our banks and exchanges were a major player. They appear set on wreaking vengeance on the free market approach which in showing those fault lines within Europe is analogous to shooting the messenger but ignoring the message.
Nothing has been achieved towards the immediate resolution of Europe's problems beyond the desired political agenda which will please the core countries and we have been ostracised as was obviously desired.
Contrary to what the inner core of Europe think there is only one player in this farce who matters and judgement will be made and appropriate action taken. In the world of global finance we are as major a hub and in some areas more so than the USA. The direction is set on the other side of the Atlantic and from there will come the eventual judgement on Europe. In politics not a lot happens by accident and we may well one day be more than grateful that Cameron took one for team UK when the French poodle snubbed him.