It would be a mistake to suppose that only (some or most) Conservatives in Britain are sceptical about the benefits of Britain joining the Euro. The opposition goes much wider and deeper than that.

A long succession of polls in Britain has reported a steady 60% or so of respondents opposed to joining. Not only that but over last year business organisations turned increasingly against joining. The advisory council of the No Euro campaign includes two previous foreign secretaries, one Conseravtive and one Labour, and two previous Chancellors of the Exchequer (treasury ministers), again one Conservative and one Labour, as well as a long string of industrialists and retired heads of civils service departments and divisions.

For those who can look at the issues in a dispassionate way, it is quite easy to understand why. The leading Eurozone economies have not been performing at all well since the launch of the Euro. It is very clear that the Eurozone economies have not converged sufficiently to justify monetary union. There is no way in prevailing conditions that one interest, rate set by the European Central Bank, can address the stabilisation problems of both strongly growing economies, such as Ireland and Spain, as well as recessed economies, like Germany and France. The fear in Britain is that joining the Eurozone would destabilise Britain’s economy which has been doing well outside with lower rates of both inflation and unemployment, and Britain has also sustained a higher GDP growth rate than the Eurozone. With all that, the supposed benefits of joining do not look credible.

Besides that, in the official Eurobarometer poll last summer, British respondents came out as easily the most sceptical of the benefits of EU membership altogether. The reports of the sleaze and corruption in the EU Commission, which came out later, are hardly likely to have increased enthusiasm, not will the report towards the end of the year that the European Court of Auditors has refused to endorse the EU accounts for the ninth year in succession.

Jacques Delors’ leftist political credentials are impeccable but:

“In another bold statement, Mr Delors - recognised as one of the main architects of the euro - says that he can understand the UK’s decision to stay out of the single currency.

“‘Since we have not succeeded in maximising the economic advantages of the euro, one can understand the British … saying: ‘Things are just fine as they are. Staying out of the euro hasn’t stopped us prospering.’ - at: http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=9&aid=14129

Attempts are regularly made to suggest or imply that those sceptical about Britain joining the Euro are somehow right-wing or extremist and that there is no intellectually respectable case for staying out. That’s not so. One of the best short books on the Euro is: Both Sides of the Coin (Profile Books, 1991), by James Forder and Christopher Huhne. Forder, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, puts the case against while Christopher Huhne, now a Liberal-Democrat Member of the European Parliament and previously an economics editor of The Guardian, makes the case for joining, so readers can get both sides of the debate, which they won’t get from reading one of the many partisan tracts. Indeed, the statement of a coherent case for Britain to join the Euro is welcome since most of the time we only get juvenile political spin and smears.

“JACQUES DELORS, the former President of the European Commission, fuelled the controversy over the euro yesterday by admitting that Britain was justified in opting out of the single currency because its launch was flawed. . .” - at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-966719,00.html

Not sure where the notion comes from that Conservatives oppose Globalisation. In Britain, the Conservatives nowadays mostly favour trade liberalisation and tax competition and believe that regulation of business can often do more harm than good, all of which is consistent with Globalisation.

It was a Conservative government which negotiated Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community in 1973 and a later Conservative government was a main driving force in establishing the Single European Act of 1986. The Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1983 election would have committed the incoming government, had Labour won that election, to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from what the manifesto termed the European Common Market. Tony Blair, Britain’s current prime minister, was first elected to Parliament in 1983 and his personal election manifesto in his constituency endorsed that commitment.

On the evidence, it is impossible to sustain a claim that the Conservatives have been anti-Europe. Their present focus is to resist what they regard as a drift towards a European federal state, involving the transfer of important functions and powers from national governments to Brussels, and they oppose Britain adopting the Euro currency to join the Eurozone. Since Britain has lower rates of both inflation and unemployment than the Eurozone, as well as a better rate of GDP growth, the case for Britain opting to join the Euro is less than transparently obvious, especially with the unresolved hiatus over the so far undisciplined unilateral breaches of the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact by France and Germany. Of course, as with most responsible political parties in opposition, the Conservatives have noticed that the European Court of Auditors has recently refused to endorse the EU accounts for the ninth year in succession.

That’s why I find this issue - like many “new EU directive” scare stories - too overblown to be worth worrying about. Human consumption standards are mostly identical in Europe, although agricultural regulation isn’t. The exceptions are national specialty dishes where derogations have been negociated, like those disgusting sheep offal dishes that ever country seems to keep around just to gross out tourists. In this case, I happen to be on the Belgian side, but not by enough to make it an issue worth fighting.

Readers uncertain about the finer points of Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy can refer for an authoritative, expert opinion here:

“A peculiar form of child abuse. In most cases it is the mother inventing symptoms and fabricating signs in relation to her child, and thus causing the child painful and unnecessary physical examinations and treatments.” - from: http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/1084.html

Sir Roy Meadow, credited with the discovery of Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy, was knighted on the advice of Tony Blair in 1998. He is currently under investigation by the General Medical. Council.

- with apologies to Lewis Carroll: http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html

If I want Belgium chocolates, I go into one of the stores I frequent or pass by and look for a box or packet labelled Belgium chocolates. If I want sausages with a low fat content, as I do, I look carefully at the ingredients labels on the packets of sausages in supermarkets to read the lean meat and fat content, as I do.

All this is not very difficult to accomplish. Most folks can manage it. Besides, Nanny has gone down with Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy (MSBP). It seems there is an epidemic of it about: http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/Professor_Sir_Roy_Meadows.htm

My view is that the chocolate deaabte was the inevitable outcome fo the collision between state-sanctioned truth-in-labelling standards (e.g. “Orange juice” must have 50% orange juice) and EU market integration. If you have a single market, you must have a single labelling-standard. If you don’t, you have no standard at all. (One could debate the need for standards at all, but I doubt the tabloids or Bob advocate the elimination of British labeling laws).

I do think the best solution (and perhaps this was the one followed) would have been to label the inferior quality chocalate as ‘British Chocolate’ and the high quality stuff as ‘Belgian chocolate’, kind of like an appellation-controle system. This has the unfortuante side-effect of the adjective ‘British’ becoming synonomous with ‘crap quality’, but there you have it.