"The EU is increasingly about war," exclaimed the outspoken UKIP leader Nigel Farage in 2013 in front of Francois Hollande and his European parliamentarian peers. Amid the collapse of the French economy and capital flight, Farage jabs at Hollande it is clearly "impossible for France and Germany to stay together inside the same economic and monetary union." So on the basis that the country is bankrupt (as France's employment minister has said), Farage asks rhetorically, "What do you do? Well, the old trick - launch a foreign military intervention." He concludes ominously prophetically, "taking on fundamentalist, radical Islam in battle is something that will launch ourselves... on a decade of unending, unwinnable misery."