What’s wrong with the euro, then?

I came across a past copy of the Daily Express, not a paper I read often even online. Above the main headline you will see: “EXCLUSIVE: Secret squad preparing us to join euro.” I know what the political inclination of the Express is, so its alarmist tone doesn’t surprise me in the least. On Page 2 is a long article headlined, “X43m is spent on unit plotting to join euro.” (The X should be a pound sign but I haven’t got one readily available on my keyboard. Sorry.) There is even a box for a poll that asks, “Is joining the euro a disaster for Britain?” and phone numbers marked Yes or No – costing at least 25p (or €0.31) per call. The article is full of words and phrases like ‘secretive’, ‘lavished on the project’, ‘will fuel fears’, ‘propaganda’, and so on. Subsequent articles and comments in that paper are much the same (see one here: “Spectre of rule by Europe, etc.”), and that isn’t the only such rag perpetrating the myth.

As anyone living in Spain on a fixed income in pounds will tell you, the exchange rate right now is crap and although I might not be an economist, I can predict that things are unlikely to get any better. Indeed, I figure we’re headed for a 1 to 1 exchange rate and an opportunity for Britain to at last join the euro zone. (Alarums from Express readers.)

What’s wrong with that? As almost any related Express article will tell you, rule by Brussels is anathema. Yet the UK is ruled by the EU already – or why are there constant complaints about it? A favourable exchange rate would surely mean that more British goods would be sold around the world, specially in Europe. And millions of travellers to the continent, that far off place just across the Channel, wouldn’t have to deal with the ‘complicated’ business of changing currencies everywhere. And let’s not even mention pensions for expat residents this side of the water, many of whom can no longer afford to live here in the style to which they’d become accustomed and most certainly couldn’t afford to live the same way in the UK either.

The first glass of wine I ever had in Spain a million years ago cost 2 pesetas (or €0.01) and it came with a tapa of delicious olives. My first wage packet in London, about a year before I took wine and tapas in Spain, was not quite X20 (or about €25 at today’s exchange rate) and wine in the pubs around Fleet Street where I worked was prohibitive, Rioja even more so and the cheap Cyprus variety undrinkable. Things have changed, of course, but in Spain we work in order to live, while in Britain it appears they live in order to work – if they’re not scamming the overloaded benefit system, that is. Not even Brussels can change those attitudes.

(c) Alexander Bewick 2008