Clear water between the Tories and Labour

This week saw Gordon Brown in Strasbourg to address the 800-strong European Parliament, and meet the Socialist Group in which Labour sits.

This speech came in the week after European leaders met in Brussels to discuss the EU's response to the financial crisis, and the week before he meets the leaders of the G20 economic powers.

Brown, whilst still quite unpopular at home, is simply getting on with the job, meeting the key players and taking difficult decisions about how best to get us out of the recession, how to minimise job losses and kick-start the economy.

And what is David Cameron doing? Well, just the week before last, he sent his top foreign policy man William Hague to Strasbourg to meet with the leader of the European Parliament's EPP-ED group, to announce that the Tories wanted to withdraw from the group. This has split his party so much that one MEP, Christopher Beazley, this week left the Conservative party as a result.

More clearly than ever, we can see quite how differently Gordon Brown and David Cameron see the world. Cameron's Conservatives clearly wish to isolate themselves from the rest of Europe, and to somehow deal with global problems on their own.

History has taught us that some problems can't be solved in isolation. The global financial crisis is one such problem. The Tories, if elected to government, would put Britain in a perilous position, where the UK would be more dependent on other countries, not less.