Reading Gary Monro’s post regarding Europhile Ken Clarke’s Tory leadership bid, prompts me to think once more about the arguments against the single currency.
I remember going to see Tony Benn speak a year or two ago, when he was promoting a recently published volume of his diaries. He made the point that if (or when) we joined the single currency, economic and financial decisions would be made by people who we could not “sack” out of office. Joing the single currency does indeed imply the “foreign control” that Gary speaks of.
There are therefore only two democratically acceptable positions to take on this issue: total non-participation, or total European federalism. Ken Clarke, New Labour and the Liberal Democrats do us a disservice by picking a position somewhere between these two stools.
Thoughts on the nature of culture and multiculture I must leave to another day. However, I think I find the idea of a federal Europe less offensive than most of my countrymen. In the UK, we already live in a federation of sorts. Despite an English accent, I have Welsh and Scots ancestry. Now I live in Edinburgh, I can be as proud of cultural icons such as David Hume, Walter Scott and Robert Burns as I am of anyone strictly English. I look forward to the day when we become the United States of Europe, when I can celebrate my illustrious countrymen: Da Vinci, Voltaire, Neitzche, Picasso!
Everyone has a right to my opinions