Britannia Radio

Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.

Guilty Men: When are the supporters of the euro going to apologise?

By Daniel Hannan

Heseltine, Blair and Clarke launch their campaign to scrap the pound

Would you trust an economic forecaster who had recently said this?

The euro, despite the foolish assumption of many commentators that it should be judged according to its external level with the dollar, has already provided great internal stability to the eurozone

Or this?

The euro has done more to enforce budgetary discipline in the rest of Europe than any number of exhortations from the IMF or the OECD. If we remain outside the euro, we will simply continue to subside into a position of relative poverty and inefficiency compared to our more prosperous European neighbours.

Alarmingly, the author of those lines is Nick Clegg, now our Deputy Prime Minister.

Even more hilariously wrong is this piece by the Environment Secretary, Chris Huhne. Every line is rich in comic irony, but perhaps the best is this one:

If we get rid of sterling and adopt the euro, we will also get rid of sterling crises and sterling overvaluations. This will give us a real control over our economic environment. Our manufacturers, farmers and other trading businesses would be able to rely on the exchange rate against our main continental trading partners staying unchanged forever.

Not that I want to pick on Lib Dems. Michael Heseltine thought it was “barking mad” not to join at the beginning. Peter Mandelson averred that “the price we will pay in lost investment and jobs would be incalculable”. Ken Clarke agreed, saying “Britain’s economy would be damaged if we stayed out too long”. Five minutes on Google will show similar sentiments from Tony Blair, Chris Patten, Gordon Brown, Vince Cable, Peter Hain and the rest.

In a superb blog post, Peter Oborne says that he contacted the chief proponents of monetary union – Hezza, Brittan, Mandie, Kinnock, Kennedy – to ask whether their views had changed. None returned his call.

I’m not holding out for a retraction (although Danny Alexander deserves credit for being one of the few Lib Dems publicly to have admitted that he got it wrong). But it would be nice if the BBC stopped trotting these characters out as if they were disinterested experts, while presenting those of us who opposed the euro as Right-wing eccentrics. We don’t want an apology, those of us who got the call right: we just want to be listened to next time.

Tags: Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander, Michael Heseltine, Nick Clegg,tony blair