Euro disaster averted in UK

It was the common sense of the average British voter that saved the country from full integration into the EU and from following the way of Greece, the chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph believes.

Peter Oborne, one of Britain's most prominent political journalists and opinion formers, has just published a pamphlet entitled ‘Guilty Men’, a term used in the 1940s to describe figures who appeased the Nazis, and chosen by Oborne to describe those trying to force Britain to join the euro.The political journalist claims that if the top figures in the British establishment who attempted to make the UK join the euro had succeeded, Britain would be in the same situation as PIGS countries.He says that the country’s political elite in the government of former British PM Tony Blair, including the Foreign Office, Treasury and the PM himself, were ruthlessly pro-euro, with the BBC, CBI (Confederation of British Industry) and Financial Times giving full media support to this agenda.“At the top of those organizations there was a corporate view that it was in British interest not just to be a part of the EU, but actually to go ahead and join the euro. They understood it was a political project; they were not really interested in the economics,” says the commentator.“They abandoned rigorous impartial journalism, a major part of the contract between the BBC and the British public – that they should be honest, impartial – they just were not,” he claims, saying the anti-euro arguments were made to look “mad, deranged and sometimes even racist”.“At the end of the day the good sense of the British people was not taken in by this high-level attempt to sabotage the debate.”“What is happening with the Eurozone now is that it is in possession of a very dogmatic monetary policy on a whole set of diverse nations,” Oborne says, explaining that “It comes from a dogma that you have to have a single currency and a single monetary policy and a single economic policy across a very diverse continent.”Peter Oborne names the Eurozone “an experiment that is now creating financial chaos and the potential for a great financial cataclysm, also wiping out industries in Europe at an extraordinary, terrifying pace”.If the UK had joined the euro, “it would have been even worse than Greece”, because the boom of interest rates would have been higher, and with the crisis, the bigger boom would have bred a bigger bust, he says.The UK would not have been able to pay its debts on the international markets and would be controlled by the IMF and bureaucrats from Brussels, Peter Oborne suggests.“We would have lost the ability to control our own economy, we would have lost the ability to project ourselves internationally, it would have been a complete and total economic and political disaster if we had joined the euro 10 years ago,” he concludes.