Over the first year of the Coalition, the Conservative Parliamentary Party has restrained itself over European issues. In part this is because it has recognised the need to focus on tackling the huge public deficit left behind by Gordon Brown and his protégé, Ed Balls. This break-out of impassiveness has also been helped, although to a lesser extent, by the Government's EU Bill, which has made the Conservative Party look and sound far more Eurosceptic. Many colleagues have also reluctantly accepted that, with the Europhile Liberal Democrats as the Coalition's bedfellows, banging the Eurosceptic drum would be unhelpful and could be destabilising. But, with Europe's ever increasing bail-outs and international loans – many drawn on the backs of struggling British taxpayers – it is no longer tenable to separate the economics of Europe from British domestic politics.