Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to build bridges with ffice:smarttags" />Europe in a speech before the EU Parliament in Strasbourg this week - and those MEPs that bothered to turn up responded with boos and heckles.fficeffice" />

Perhaps they were just trying to make him feel at home. After all it is the sort of reaction he is used to at gatherings in the UK – particularly if any backbench Labour MPs are present.

But if this is the response from the EU when the Prime Minister makes what was widely regarded as a ‘pro-European’ speech, what possible hope is there of meaningful reform?

In fact Blair made some significant concessions to the European integrationalists by suggesting more ‘co-ordination’ of tax policy within the EU, or in other words, handing even more power to Brussels.

I suspect if the people of Europe are asked for their views on this idea they will blow the same raspberry as the French and Dutch sounded when they were asked to approve the overblown and bureaucratic EU constitution.

But in truth this is just a case of re-arranging the deck chairs on a sinking cruise liner.

Europe is heading for a crisis of enormous proportions, and the EU, inflexible and outdated like a modern day ancien regime, is either unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

Low growth, high unemployment, a falling birth rate and welfare spending that is running out of control, shackles Europe’s ability to compete just at a time when the rest of the world is getting its act together economically.

Your average mainland European seems to think that they can go on having longer holidays, shorter working weeks, increased pay, improved benefits and, of course, fat subsidies for French farmers – and the EU fairy will wave her magic wand and pay for it all.

And if we close our eyes really, really tightly all that nasty competition from China, India and Brazil will simply disappear!

Take for example the thorny issue of public sector pension deficits. You may think the UK is in dire straights with a public pensions black hole estimated at between £500bn and £750bn, but compared to most of our European neighbours we are in fine fettle. The Greeks, for example, will have to cough up 25% of GDP to pay for public sector pensions by 2040.

In other words if Europe carries on its present course we are looking at total economic collapse within half a century.

In contrast the UK is in far better shape to compete in the real world. The last thing we want to do is to tie our tidy little ship to the huge, rotting hulk that is the EU so that when she goes down, she drags us with her.

ffice:smarttags" />France was a stalwart supporter of pre-democratic Iraq and President Jacques Chirac did everything he could to help his good friend Saddam Hussein cling to power.fficeffice" />

France was also the chief cheerleader in the West for the so-called intifada – the campaign of violence aimed at Israeli civilians launched by Yasser Arafat after he rejected the offer of a viable Palestinian state in 2000.

The cynical calculation was that by courting extremist Arab opinion, the French could somehow insulate themselves from the wave of Islamist violence sweeping the globe.

In the past week, with France ablaze from the Channel to the Mediterranean Sea, it has become clear that this policy was not only despicable and cowardly, but mistaken too.

The intifada has come home to roost, and the French don’t like it one little bit.

It is one thing cheering on as a school bus is atomised in Tel Aviv, but entirely another when the jihad consumes your own neighbourhood.

We’ve been here before of course. Irish Americans were quite happy to fund the Republican ‘armed struggle’ when pregnant women were being blown apart in far-distant Omagh.

But once the planes started to crash into buildings in downtown Manhattan, they suddenly decided that terrorism wasn’t such a good idea after all.

For the bien pensant sophisticates of the West violence quickly loses its titillating allure once it starts happening on their own doorstep.

It was a bitter and humiliating pill to swallow – and now the French are faced with the same unpalatable medicine.

But if the recent violence helps to inject a bit of backbone into the French political class, the rioters will have done their country a service.

The French need to understand that we are all fighting the same war – from the council-funded jihadi classes of Beeston to the nightclubs of Bali; from the hotels of Amman to the suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois.

It is a battle – not of our making – that pitches tolerance and liberty on the one hand against bigotry and totalitarianism on the other, and it is about time the French decided whose side they are on.

And if they need to stiffen the sinews they should learn a lesson from their own recent history – appeasement in the face of fascist aggression leads not to peace, but to shame, ignominy and defeat.