France said on Sunday it regretted Britain's decision to use its veto at an EU summit on Friday saying the 27-nation bloc would have been better off if British Prime Minister David Cameron had voted with the rest, reports Reuters.
"It would have been better if Britain had followed this historic movement," Finance Minister François Baroin told BFM television. "We regret the decision. It's a pity."
At a Brussels summit on Friday, Britain vetoed a plan for a new EU treaty that would impose closer EU control over national government budgets in order to curb the bloc's debt crisis. Cameron said the proposed deal risked exposing London's powerful financial services industry to unwelcome EU regulation.
The other member states, including the 17 using the euro, now plan to adopt a separate pact without Britain, leaving the island nation alone as never before in the EU, a club it joined in 1973 but which Britons have long viewed with distrust.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé said London had "isolated itself", but that for years Britain had seen Europe only as a single market.
Read more of this report from Reuters.