The Umpteenth Blue 'mare of David Cameron

I remember early in my Master's degree course, there was a special appearance by a UKIP member from Kent at the weekly discussion session on a pre-arranged subject for those who wanted a little extracurricular to their courses.  This representative of UKIP was largely humoured by the student crowd and treated seriously until he came to use the phrase the 'EUSSR', which triggered a landslide of guffaws from the lecture hall's terraces.  He tried to make light of it with the reply of "You may well laugh but..." yet his relevance as a sober panel member was shot.
As risible a comparison as Nigel Farage's claim that the EU's approach to Ukraine was a 'militaristic foreign policy', the term 'EUSSR', while a favoured rallying cry among EU-phobes, is offensive not just to the European Commission of the EU but all those people who laboured under the yoke of one-party tyranny in the Soviet Union, with all the lack of freedoms which are not lacking in the EU.  The EU does not operate a gulag archipelago, it does not imprison dissidents in mental institutions, it does not repress political or religious expression, it does not operate a command economy and so on and so on. But then UKIP supporters know little and care less about the space that is now post-Soviet - that's why 23,000 voted for other anti-EU parties on the ballot sheet, costing UKIP an extra MEP in the new European Parliament.  A satirical Huffington Post map of "the world according to UKIP" divides Russia into 'Romania and Bulgaria', 'Ratvestia (cannibals)' and 'Mordor'.
I mention this as it is apparent that UKIP members view the European Union as an empire (and one which is not a jolly hockey sticks British one at that).  So it is curious that David Cameron should play into their hands so plainly.  At the EU summit, the prime minister said that the vote showed the need to emphasise "nation states wherever possible and the EU wherever necessary."  A student of PPE, Cameron would know that he was alluding to Palmerston's dictum of 'trade where possible and empire where necessary'.  Even if UKIP supporters by the party's own admission are 'less well-educated' than the average Londoner, it hardly helps Cameron when he attempts to persuade his own party to back a renegotiation of terms with the EU when people say that in his mind it is imperial.  On the other hand, we could treat Cameron as Karl Marx treated Louis Napoleon (III) in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, that history repeats itself - the first time is tragedy, the second time is farce; if the actions of Palmerston were brutal, then the statements of Cameron are certainly farcical.