WHICH big countries or power blocks are natural allies for David Cameron's Britain? I do not mean pragmatic, business-like allies. I mean the kind of allies that think the same way, share the same instincts: companionable, easy, affectionate allies. I cannot think of one.

I am not even sure this is Britain's fault. I think we are just becoming an outlier.

Start with the European Union. As regular/patient readers may know, I was based in Brussels until the summer. Since returning I have consciously steered clear of EU subjects—there was more than enough to learn about and think about closer to home. But in the last few days, I have been gloomily observing the anger among Conservative members of parliament and the conservative commentariat, as they ponder the fact that while Britain is about to endure deep and painful cuts in public spending, the EU budget for 2011 is set to rise by at least 2.9%, with the European Parliament (wielding new budget powers thanks to the Lisbon Treaty), pushing for a spending hike closer to 6%.

Again, as regular readers will know, I feel something that approaches despair (but is hopefully less pompous than despair) at the reporting of almost everything that involves the EU in Britain. And this time, too, I could launch into a whole festival of quibbling about how Britain's debate on the EU budget is a sorry mess of ellisions, conflations and sticks picked up from the wrong end. There was, for example, much cheering in the blogosphere when David Ruffley, a Tory MP, asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne this week:

Our net contribution to the EU is, amazingly, projected to double in this Parliament from £4.7 billion to £9.5 billion a year. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me and many of my Bury St Edmunds constituents that if we are to cut the deficit, we need to cut our spending on the EU?

The same cheerleaders in the blogosphere and in the national press noted that (to quote ConservativeHome):

while nearly every other budget is being cut the EU budget is allowed to grow. That's right - the same budget that auditors won't sign off.

And 37 Tory MPs duly supported an amendment calling on the Government to reduce Britain's contribution to the EU budget.

Ok, so here is a bit of quibbling.

(1) Several different things are being conflated here. The EU has seven year "Financial Perspectives", budget envelopes that are agreed only after terrific amounts of argy-bargy among national leaders. It also has annual budgets which are derived from those overall seven year envelopes but which can be tweaked a bit if the various interested parties (national governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament) agree.

The budget hike that came before the British House of Commons this week concerns the 2011 annual budget, and is contentious because at a time of straitened national finances the commission and the parliament are both sufficiently tin-eared to think that a spending increase of almost 6% is just fine and dandy, because the Lisbon Treaty has given the EU lots of exciting new responsibilities, forcing the various institutions to hire thousands of new officials, rent new offices, slaughter fatted calves and the rest of it. At a recent summit of EU national leaders, Britain and six allies (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria and the Czech Republic) pushed for a budget freeze. Alas, the big countries who could have swung behind a budget freeze, ie Germany, decided not to do so, and the summit ended up proposing a compromise number of a 2.9% rise. Now, the European Parliament—a body that never met a budget increase it disliked, possibly because it does not have to justify tax hikes to actual voters—is pushing to re-open the whole sorry argument and insist on a rise of 6%.

(2) The European Parliament is not going to get its way. If it pushes too hard (and some MEPs are threatening to veto the 2011 budget) then the default position is to revert to the 2010 budget.

(3) The whopping increase in British contributions that Tories like David Ruffley are talking about has nothing to do with this row about the 2011 budget. They are talking about a piece of rather abject diplomacy pulled off by the last Labour government, when the current seven year budget was being thrashed out. For various reasons too complex to go into here, back in 2005 Tony Blair found himself rather brilliantly ambushed by the French into choosing between budget reform and sticking it to new member states in the ex-communist world. Scrambling to save face, he did a deal to increase the budget and give up hefty chunks of the British rebate first agreed by Margaret Thatcher in exchange for root and branch reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Because it was so politically toxic to give up the British rebate, the deal was tapered so that the initial effects would be minimal but would become really chunky after a few years. By unhappy accident, Britain is now hitting the period when its rebate starts swirling down the plughole like a cold bath and its contributions to the EU budget start rising rather sharply, just at the moment that the boom years are a painful memory and austerity is starting to bite. Oh, and the French reneged on the agreement to reform the CAP.

(4) The timeless gripe—beloved of British Eurosceptics—that the EU's own Court of Auditors cannot sign off on the union's annual accounts means less than you think. It is not an admission of anarchy and Sicilian style fraud. It is a consequence of the fact that most EU spending is delivered by national governments and regional authorities, and many of them are unable to cross every t and dot every i when it comes to spending. Some of this is because money is stolen, a lot more is to do with red tape. Oh, and lots of big developed countries would be unable to sign off their national budgets if they used the same rules as the EU.

(5) At the end of the day, the EU's budget is pretty piffling. It accounts to 2.5% of all public spending in the EU, notes my colleague Charlemagne.

But do you know what, I don't really have the heart to quibble about points 1 to 5. They are all true, but the bigger truth is that the EU really genuinely does not see what the British are so upset about, when it comes to EU spending. Forget the European Parliament, a ghastly bunch whose new powers are the worst thing about the Lisbon Treaty. The really alarming thing is that Britain could not persuade big allies to join it in fighting a hefty rise in administrative spending by the EU, at this time of belt-tightening. In London, among the Conservative commentariat, the assumption may be that those awful continentals are simply too deep in the trough to want spending limited. Actually, it is worse than that. Germany and France will end up paying the same or more as Britain towards an increased EU budget. No, they simply think differently from us, especially the Germans.

For them, a bigger, more ambitious EU is still a good in itself: for Germany, a rejection of nationalism, the ultimate evil. For France, a way to leverage French influence and allow French leaders to strut on the world stage. If Britons want to understand how other EU nations are happy to increase the union's budget, they need to think about the British government's promise to ring-fence spending on the Department of International Development. I'd say that is a pretty close analogy: it just feels like morally upright, nice spending, and even if you know some of the money is going to end up being wasted or stolen, at the end of the day, it is one of the titchier budgets, so why not?

We simply do not think like the other big beasts in the EU, and that is a pretty sobering thought. It is, frankly, stupid and wrong to be increasing the budget of the EU at this time. I suspect the EU is about to try to impose misconceived financial regulation on the City of London.

So to that extent, I am on the side of the angry Tory commentators who surround me in London. I differ from them because they think that Britain has a range of attractive alternatives to full EU membership, and I think the alternatives are not attractive at all. But this budget row shows us that Britain is as far away as ever from influencing the main direction of travel in the EU. I yield to nobody in my affection for Sweden and other Nordic countries. I love the Czechs. The Dutch are proper free market liberals. But they are not big enough allies for Britain.

This blog posting is turning out to be longer than I had hoped. This happens. But to turn briefly to America, it seems to me that David Cameron's Britain has a big problem there too. On lots and lots of fronts, starting with deficit reduction, Mr Cameron takes a different view from Barack Obama. Where they do agree, all the signs are that this is a cool, detached sort of relationship, not a friendship driven by gut instinct and innate understanding. It is no better when it comes to the American right. Britain's lonely band of neo-conservative hardmen, many of them employed to write by the Daily Telegraph, were made very cross the other day when David Cameron distanced himself energetically from the Tea Party movement in an interview with the Financial Times. Asked by the historian Simon Schama what he thought of "American conservatism's lurch to the libertarian extreme," Mr Cameron replied:

“How shall I put this? We seem to have drifted apart… there is an element of American conservatism that is headed in a very culture war direction, which is just different. There are differences with the American right.”

The Telegraph's US editor, Toby Harnden, accuses Mr Cameron of woeful arrogance and ignorance, arguing:

The Tea Party is not about “culture wars”. The social conservative element of it is minimal, unless you choose to base your view on a few placards carefully picked out by MSNBC. Yes, Sarah Palin is undoubtedly a social conservative but Sarah Palin is not the Tea Party. And in general it's incontrovertible that the Republican party and the American Right is much less concerned about issues like abortion and gay marriage than it was six years ago.

I have not reported from America since 2005, so cannot say if that is an accurate summary of the Tea Party movement. But living in Britain, I feel confident in saying it is missing a much bigger point: Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement are roughly a million miles from the mainstream of British politics, and if they succeed in pulling American politics in their direction then Britain and America will find themselves a similarly long way apart.

So where are Britain's instinctive allies? Well, Mr Cameron and the Foreign Secretary William Hague talk a good game about forging new bilateral ties with emerging powers like the BRICs and paying more attention to the Commonwealth. The Eurosceptic grassroots of the Tory party still fantasise about a break with Europe in favour of the Anglosphere: an alliance of the world's free-trading, English-speaking, upright, hard-working, sturdy maritime powers. I would invite them to show me evidence that India, South Africa and other Commonwealth giants (let alone Brazil, Russia and China) see the world as we do. Do such powers vote with us at the United Nations? Do they back us at the World Trade Organisation? Did they stand with Britain at the Copenhagen climate change talks in 2009? Do they share our view of Iran's nuclear programme?

Well what about Australia, the Tory commentariat may say. They certainly became very excited when the Australian conservative leader, Tony Abbott, came very close to an upset defeat of the sitting Labour government down under. They need to calm down. Awkward, angry and socially conservative, Tony Abbott would be completely unelectable as a national politician in Britain. To simplify, he appeals to that part of Australian public opinion that overlaps with Britain inasmuch as it resembles Essex with sunshine.

To end a long posting, there are undoubtedly foreign leaders who enjoy a deeply instinctive rapport with Mr Cameron. The most obvious is Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, though even there Mr Reinfeldt is more pragmatic about the EU than Mr Cameron (he supported the Lisbon Treaty, for instance). But this country lacks soulmates among the world's great powers. Too American to fit in on the continent. Too European to comprehend America's Tea Party insurgency or the rough and tumble of Australian politics. Too Western to become a linchpin of some deep alliance based on the Commonwealth's emerging powers.

Britain has stumbled into a lonely spot on the map.