If everybody keeps to the timetable, the EU Council will discuss the British question today and, hopefully, the British Cabinet will discuss the situation at a special extraordinary Cabinet meeting on Friday morning. Then David Cameron will announce the date of the referendum.

He will do this before the weekend as those ministers who will speak in favour of Brexit did not want to spend another weekend in limbo.

Thus, by tomorrow, the die will be cast. David will have crossed his Rubicon.

At this point, there is little point in retracing what led to this.

Britain was never comfortable in the EU. It entered the then EEC mostly because De Gaulle had said his famous Non.

For all that today's communication and interpersonal relations have made distance irrelevant, for all the various historical interventions by Britain on the continent, there has always been a net separation between Britain and the Continent.

Ever since Britain joined, it was always uncomfortable. Its press was determinedly Eurosceptic, fed on scare stories. Every directive coming from Brussels was instantly suspect.

Time and again, the Eurosceptic segment of British public opinion destabilized governments (especially if they were Conservative) and the Eurosceptic UKIP rose brilliantly in the polls (ironically in the European Parliament elections, less so in the national elections). So it was time to lance the boil.

We will now be very interested bystanders in the coming campaign. In a way, it may well go the way of the Scottish referendum - all arguments and hot air for the people to conclusively shy away from the break. What broke the back of that poll was when as it got near, people began to be afraid the banks would go, and their social security system would face huge problems.

Some things are the same in Britain, some things are not. There was talk, until a week ago, that HSBC for instance would move out but now it seems it has had a change of heart. As for social security, maybe the boot is on the other foot now: it is Britain which does not want to retain a system which has made many, EU citizens like Poles, or not but the other EU Member States are adamant Britain must keep its present system.

It is very difficult, at least as seen from here, for the Britain IN campaign to take off and persuade people - as much as it is easy to spread suspicion about the EU, its nameless bureaucrats, its unelected structures, etc

Nevertheless, Britain for all its standoffishness, is an integral and important part of Europe. Its contribution to European history cannot be underestimated. It defended Europe's freedom when the core of today's EU were imprisoned in a dictatorship..

Its economy and its business sector is linked to Europe. This does not mean that a Brexit would sever these trade links or that the UK economy would collapse. On the contrary, being outside the Eurozone seems to have helped the British economy flourish.

At this point, one waits to see what final agreement David Cameron will get from his fellow leaders at the Brussels council.

Although maybe that is not the point, it should have never been the point. The British people did not need to come to this. For just as other Member States decided just a few weeks ago, that national interest demanded that they bypass the EU rules and regulations, it is not hard to see why Britain should not have done the same and imposed its own rules on eg social assistance which is attracting social security shoppers like jam attracts flies.