TODAY's Financial Timescarries a letter from 14 Conservative MPs elected in the 2010 intake, who—the FTreports—are trying to create a new moderate school of Euroscepticism. The lead author, Chris Heaton-Harris, is a man to watch. He is a former member of the European Parliament and thus unusually knowledgeable about the workings of the European Union, while his robust dislike of European integration gives him credibility with his peers, who are probably the most Eurosceptic cohort of Tory MPs ever. I would not be astonished to see him in government before many of his contemporaries.

Bear with me as I quote from the letter at some length: it captures perfectly the mood among many MPs, I think.

Basically, it makes three points:

1. So far, Britain has "taken a back seat in the crisis affecting the eurozone". This needs rethinking because—through membership of the EU and the International Monetary Fund, and bilateral loans to Ireland—British taxpayers are "underwriting some €14bn in loan guarantees to Greece, Ireland and Portugal". Britain needs to move from the back seat and seek more control because:

the solutions to the crisis proposed by eurozone countries amount to no more than “throwing good money after bad” and will further expose the British taxpayer to any future economic meltdown." [Thus Britain should] "take the taxpayers' side in resisting further bail-outs".

2. What is more, Britain should be more active because a meltdown of the euro zone as a whole would be unbelievably scary and expensive, or as they write:

New research by Open Europe shows that the UK now has an exposure to the eurozone of over €700bn, mostly via our banking system, €300bn of which is to the weaker eurozone economies.

3. The euro crisis leaves continental partners at our mercy, so this is a splendid moment to push for the things Britain has long wanted from the EU, namely a free-trade area with more liberalisation and less integration, and a smaller budget for the EU while you are at it. Or as they write:

The crisis affecting those countries that use the euro has created a political vacuum at the heart of Europe which we believe the UK government can use to shape the EU's post-crisis order. In particular, the government must take a tougher approach than its predecessors, including the use of our veto to extract significant concessions. Ultimately, the UK needs to develop a bold new EU strategy aimed at changing Europe into a more competitive, vibrant and accountable trade bloc. We must take the taxpayers' side in resisting further bail-outs and pushing for wide-ranging reform consistent with the liberalisation of trade, the principle of subsidiarity and the wholesale reduction of the waste for which the European Commission is responsible. Above all we must start getting some value in return for the significant sums that UK taxpayers contribute to the EU's budget.

The thing is, I am not sure how points 1, 2 and 3 hang together. Point 1 is that Britain must take a grip because it already risks losing some portion of €14 billion in the event of a default by a struggling euro zone member, and so should resist increasing that exposure by insisting on an end to bail outs.

But Point 2 implies that Britain's potential losses from bail outs, though very annoying for a country that always thought the euro was a duff idea, are probably smaller than Britain's potential losses in the event of a euro zone meltdown. I draw this implication from the fact that 300 is a bigger number than 14 (and 700 is bigger still, should the entire euro zone melt down). So if Point 1 is "leave the back seat, grab the steering wheel and demand an end to bail outs", it seems an odd omission that the letter should say nothing at all about how the authors would save the euro zone from a meltdown, in the absence of the bail outs that annoy them so much.

Now, please don't start accusing me of saying that the euro is in good shape, or that Greece should have been allowed to join, or that the bail outs agreed so far are doing anything other than kicking the can down the road and hoping that—by lessening the intensity of the fiscal adjustments needed in countries like Greece—those bail out loans may increase the chances of Greece recovering. I think the euro zone is in terrible shape, and that the next step needed is probably as orderly a default as Greece can manage, given that its national debts are unsustainably huge.

But if you believe, as the 14 MPs do, that bail outs must stop now because they are throwing good money after bad, are you saying that the collapse of the euro zone periphery is inevitable? If you are saying that, and if (as per Point 2) you think the collapse of the euro zone periphery could cost Britain some chunk of €300 billion, then the losses mentioned in Point 1 start to seem a little beside the point, no?

Because Point 3 is certainly not a solution to meltdown in the euro zone. It is a perfectly sensible shopping list of all the liberal measures that Britain has wanted to impose on its European neighbours ever since it joined the EEC, preceded by a false assertion that there is currently a "policy vacuum" in the EU, which a British shopping list might fill.

There isn't a policy vacuum in the EU just now as a result of the euro crisis. There is a vacuum when it comes to attractive scenarios for the euro zone. There is a striking absence of policy ideas that are appealing.

But if you follow the news from Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, Berlin and so on, you can see there is a positive abundance of policy suggestions out there. These proposals include calls for a European finance minister with powers to oversee national budgets, the launch of eurobonds to allow users of the single currency to pool their borrowing costs, and the rescue of the periphery through a fiscal transfer union accompanied by European taxes and an increase in the EU budget to 20% of GDP (up from 1% now). All those ideas would be anathema to the British government and indeed to me. But that does not mean they do not exist.

What the letter-writers are really saying is that they think that all the ideas in circulation sound stupid and offensive, are doomed to fail and in the process risk costing Britain money. But Point 3 clearly also recognises that some new mechanisms or structures are on the way, at which point Britain will have to give its approval, at which point Britain will have a veto, at which point the MPs think Britain should push for all the things it has always wanted.

But here's the thing. Here is how this risks looking for the other 26 members of the EU. The euro house is burning down (because stupidly it was partly built of straw and lit with candles), and so its 17 owners now want to spend lots of money on a fire engine. Britain (whose banks loaned an alarming chunk of the original money for the construction of the straw house) thinks a fire engine will not change the fact that the euro house is flammable, so is refusing to put any money into the fire engine fund.

But because Britain will have a vote in the group discussion on buying a new fire engine, the 14 MP letter-writers think this would be a brilliant moment to interrupt proceedings and demand that the owners of the straw house join a gym and lose weight, as Britain has so often advised before.

As I said above, don't start accusing me of defending the construction of the current euro zone. But if the proof of the 14 MPs' moderacy is their acceptance that a collapse of the euro zone would be a bad and dangerous thing (as opposed to a source of pure celebration, as it is for some ultras), then they have to explain, surely, what they would do to save it. This letter does not amount to that explanation.