Will the Eurozone move to help the UK if we fall into difficulties?

Hell no:

Jean-Pierre Jouyet, a former French Europe minister and the current chairman of France’s financial services authority, yesterday predicted only "God would help" a rudderless Britain after it snubbed its euro zone neighbours.

"There is not a two speed Europe but a three speed Europe. You have Europe of the euro, Europe of the countries that understand the euro … and you have the English," he said.

"The English are very certainly going to be targeted given the political difficulties they have. Help yourself and heaven will help you. If you don’t want to show solidarity to the euro zone, then let’s see what happens to the United Kingdom."

But Euro-blandishments are not slow in heading to the new occupant of No 10:

Sweden, with a centre-Right Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who is a close political ally and personal friend of David Cameron, has called on Britain, a fellow non-euro country, to change its mind.

Anders Borg, Sweden’s finance minister, said his country was thinking of supporting the EU fund even though his country rejected euro membership six years ago.

"It is completely unrealistic to think one cannot," he said. "I think it is unrealistic to imagine that Britain won’t take part. London is Europe’s financial centre. If bank financing and payments no longer work, it will only take a few days before the financial markets in London are dramatically affected."

The whole point of the new Eurozone arrangements (made up on the run) is to reallocate risk ultimately to taxpayers in a few countries, thereby significantly increasing the ‘moral hazard’ problem:

I think that the EU has developed a much stronger external narrative, telling markets that they should treat the eurozone as a single whole, which is strong and solvent, and not try to pick off weaker members because they will get their fingers burned.

But, and I think this is still a big but, the political narrative inside the eurozone is still lagging way behind. If the markets outside are being told to treat the eurozone as a single fortress, defended by unlimited budgetary firepower from the rich members of the club, voters in places like Germany, the Netherlands or Finland are absolutely not being told that they now inhabit a single economic entity, in which big chunks of the budget are pooled.

Eurozone 2 is, in a word, dishonest.

So if the UK so bungles its finances so grossly that we have to call in outside assistance, it should be from the global marketplace according to normal market disciplines or from the IMF in the usual ‘take your medicine’ way.

We should not go crawling to the German, Finnish and Dutch taxpayers for alms, the more so when those taxpayers have not been asked to sign a huge blank cheque to let the French loftily help other countries (or not) at their expense..

UK to Eurozone members:

We have a Conservative-led government. We are not a nation of second-handers and moochers:

You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing.

A handy working definition of the European Central Bank, now that Germany with its erstwhile iron financial discipline has been reduced by Paris to become a nation of schmucks?