It's Time to Put Up or Shut Up on the Euro
by Richard Littlejohn

What have you been talking about over the last few days - "I'm a Celebrity", whether the house needs decorating, where shall we go on holiday, shame about West Ham? It's a fair assumption that the one thing not on the tip of your tongue was the euro.

Yet until Clare Short spat the dummy yesterday, the political classes seem to have spoken about little else. It's like an illness with them. As far as The Guardian on Saturday was concerned, the most important thing which had happened anywhere in the world in the previous 24 hours was that an outfit called Britain in Europe might fold unless Tony Blair promises to scrap the Pound immediately.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

Ever since the war in Iraq finished, the pro-euro crowd has been on the rampage, cranking up the hysteria with the enthusiastic encouragement of the BBC. The truth of the matter is that nothing has changed. Whatever Gordon Brown says about his magic five tests, there is no great appetite for joining the single currency. If anything public opinion has hardened against it.

So where does Leader of the Commons John Reid get the idea that "the decision is not whether we will join the euro but when will we join the euro"? Oh, yeah? That decision isn't his to take. Or Blair's, or the Cabinet's.

The British people will decide in a referendum, not on when we join, but if we join. And all the indications are that we will overwhelmingly vote "no". The economic argument in favour of scrapping the Pound has been blown apart. All those dire warnings that millions of jobs would be lost and the economy would collapse if we didn't join have been exposed as the lies they always were.

Britain has prospered outside the euro, while unemployment on the Continent has rocketed. Germany, once the powerhouse of Europe, is a basket case, for the simple reason that it no longer has control over its own economic destiny. Most Germans want the deutschmark back.

Inward investment has fallen in Britain, but that is largely as a result of American companies drawing in their horns since 9/11. It will recover as the American economy bounces back on the strength of President Bush's tax-cutting programme.

We were told that businesses would relocate to countries within the eurozone. So why has Vauxhall this week announced that it will build the new Astra in Britain? The pro-euro gang yesterday wheeled out a couple of dozen businessmen to bang their gong. It was an unrepresentative sample and nothing we haven't heard a hundred times before.

Polls regularly show that two thirds of British businesses want to keep the Pound. The euro has always been about politics, not economics, a central plank in the construction of the United States of Europe. Blair has been content to allow the argument to focus on the euro, hoping he could slip the new European Constitution - which would sound the death-knell for Britain as an independent nation - under the radar.

That's not going to happen either. He's been rumbled as people have woken up to the threat of being swallowed by the new superstate. If Blair thinks he's getting that through without the consent of the British people, he'd better prepare for a backlash which will make the squabble over the euro look like a mild disagreement at a church tea party.

Britain belongs to the British people. So does the Pound. It does not belong to Blair or any other politician. If he wants the euro, he should hold a vote on it now. It's time to put up or shut up.
The Sun, 13th May 2003

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