Tag Archives: europhile

“Becoming EU-sceptic”

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Prolific Euroblogger Julien Frisch – “a convinced European citizen and glad to be a citizen of the European Union” – is approaching his first anniversary of blogging. During that time, his coveraged has been both eclectic and entertaining, informative and interesting. (If you’ve not been reading him anyway, you really should be…)

But now, after a solid year of blogging about the EU from a pro-EU perspective, the sheer incompetence and bloody-mindedness of the political elites that oversee the frequently useless manner in which the EU functions has seemingly forced him to radically shift his opinions:

“I think I am becoming an absolute EU-sceptic…

When I look at all this, I more and more get the impression that the EU has failed to be the project of Europeans.

The EU is the project of power games, mostly between old, worn-out men who try to compare the length of their penises instead of caring for the interests of the continent. In one of these contests, an old Pole now has apparently won the EP presidency over an old Italian guy.

On the one side, the EU is a PR project of technocrats who have no interest in supporting a common European identity and a genuine European democracy, and on the other side, it is the ideal supranational playing field for nationalists who always fight for “the best” of their countries instead of promoting the best for Europe as a whole.

They all lack European ambition, they all lack spirit, and they all don’t have any idea where they want this Union to be in 10 years.

The more I watch them doing this, the less interested I am in what they do. The more I listen to their heartless speeches, their superficial declarations, their diplomatic compromises, the more I am convinced that nothing will change.

I know how he feels.

This is a vital, fundamental problem that the EU seems repeatedly unable to address – it is excruciatingly hard to be enthusiastic about the European Union. No matter how much you try, the more you look into it, the more you see its flaws. The more you look for sensible ideas for its future purpose and reform, the more you see the tsunami of inadequates that tend to gain positions of power in the damn thing rise up and threaten to swamp the whole project in a deluge of tedium, petty squabbles, meaningless jargon and total lack of vision.

This is precisely why I maintain that genuine europhiles are a very rare breed indeed: The EU is simply not loveable. It has the potential to turn into something truly great, and I still maintain that it is more good than bad, but it is deeply flawed – and that flaw stems from the people in charge of the damned thing: a never-ending rota of short-term losers, none of whom have anything personal to gain from looking to the EU’s long-term success, only from securing short-term advantages pursuit of positive PR (usually aimed at their national publics for national electoral reasons, rather than a European public for altruistic reasons).

As I’ve noted many times over the 6 years that I’ve been blogging about the damned thing, the fundamental question that remains unanswered is what is the EU for? The people who run the thing don’t know – nor do they seem to care. Little wonder, then, that those of us – like Julien, like me, like those British eurosceptics who want it to be just a trading bloc – with a clear vision of what we think that the EU should be about… Little wonder that, well, from time to time we all just get so damned pissed off with the whole thing.

The EU represents a good idea, executed with varying degrees of success. As with any hit and miss project, it’s largely a matter of perception whether you think the hits outweigh the misses. But when the people running the thing are so useless – and when it looks increasingly likely that Barroso is likely to return as Commission President despite having singularly failed in every important task with which he was faced during his term in office (passing the Constitution, passing the Lisbon Treaty, negotiating reform of the budget, starting to reform the CAP, etc. etc. etc.), well… Little wonder that what enthusiasm you do have starts to wane.

Nonetheless, I remain optimistic – precisely because of the ongoing stalemate, stagnation and incompetent management that has dogged the EU for the last decade. There’s only so much longer this can carry on before *everyone* gets thoroughly pissed off. And when that happens – finally – we may see some serious reform.

I’d give it another few years, though. Around about the time of the next budget negotiations in 2013, most likely – though possibly sooner if the Lisbon Treaty somehow ends up getting scrapped. (They used to say that a week is a long time in politics – when it comes to the EU, time works differently again, and a year is like a week in any other organisation. It takes a long time for these things to happen. A very long time. Patience… Patience…)

The dishonesty of the EU debate

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Over at his Economist blog, Charlemagne asks “Why it is anti-EU to suggest that the European Parliament does not work very well?”

Herein lies one of the most fundamental problems of the EU debate – something to which I seem repeatedly to return.

The EU is an incredibly complex socio-economic political experiment – a type of regulatory/governmental body unlike anything that has ever been tried before. It is made up of myriad institutions and semi-official bodies, many of which have vast areas of overlap both with each other and with national governments. Good chunks of the EU machinery work only through sharing staff with the agencies, civil services and governments of the member states (the Council being made up of ministers from the member states, the Commission relying on the law-drafting powers of civil servants from the member states, and so on).

At the same time, the EU works across a vast array of policy and regulatory areas – agriculture, fisheries, monetary policy (in some member states, at least), migration and immigration, trade, security and justice, competition and business, aspects of education, sporting and cultural events, and on and on and on.

And yet, whenever the merits of the EU are discussed – especially in the mainstream media – it is presented in simple, confrontational black and white terms. You are either for the EU, or you are against. A eurosceptic or a europhile. Pro-EU or anti-EU.

Like Charlemagne, I’ve been accused of being both a eurosceptic and a europhile in my time – I describe myself as loosely pro-EU, so to some of those in the anti- camp, that makes me a europhile; yet I frequently criticise the EU, so to some of those in the pro- camp I am a eurosceptic.

Yet both europhiles and eurosceptics (and especially their most fervent elements, the withdrawalists and the superstatists) represent the extremes of opinion on the EU. It’s like presenting a jury in a trial with only two alternatives – either let the accused off Scott free or execute them, with no option for fines, community service, rehab or prison sentences. (To make matters worse, although there is a sizable minority of eurosceptics who are actively anti-EU and advocate either withdrawal or its abolition, I have come across very few uncritical europhiles – an imbalance that distorts the debate yet further.)

The presentation of the arguments about the EU in such a manner is not just misleading – it is also dishonest. The choice is not between a federal European superstate and complete withdrawal – yet it suits the extremes on both sides to play up this false binary choice. The europhiles warn of the dire consequences of international isolation should we not back further integration, while the euroscptics warn of a loss of sovereignty and national identity should we continue to allow the EU to expand its influence.

Neither option has to be the case – nor is either option likely in an organisation made up of 27 member states where vetoes and unanimity ensure that almost all decisions are watered-down compromises. Yet these extremes are pretty much all we are ever told about – the dire danger of passing the Constitution / Lisbon Treaty is to move ever closer to the superstate; the dire danger of not passing it is the breakup of the EU itself and a descent into the bad old days of national rivalries and protectionist squabbles. This is nonsense.

Yet in the public debates about the EU there seems to be no room for any shades of grey – indeed, in my experience of doing media punditry about the EU, extreme views are positively encouraged to “liven up” a subject usually (and correctly) considered rather dull.

The idea of a political system that works pretty much entirely via compromise and cooperation, as the EU does, seems anathema to a press that’s always keen to play up political differences and conflict. When faced with a political organisation that, on the surface, seems more or less monolithic (“the EU” being shorthand for the European Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Justics, or any of its other institutions and agencies depending on the context – sometimes even individual Commissioners and MEPs, and occasionally even institutions that have nothing to do with the EU), the press – and in turn the extreme pro- and anti-EU groups who find such a situation to their advantage – has created a conflict between two artificial extremes in order to force the debate to conform to anachronistic preconceptions about how political discourse is conducted that are entirely inappropriate when approaching something as innovative and unique as the EU.

I remain convinced – and the continued falling turnout at EU elections tends to support this – that the vast majority of people neither really know nor care about the EU enough to form an opinion one way or the other, and that this artificial binary choice between pro- and anti- is serving only to put more people off. But at the same time, anyone who starts looking into the EU with an open mind – as I like to think I have tried to do – will end up (if they are not tricked by the vast amounts of disinformation that seems to swamp all EU debate into believing things that are simply not true) somewhere in the grey middle ground, neither supporting it entirely, nor wishing for it to be done away with. One of the reasons for the continuing decline in turnout at EU elections, I’d suggest, is precisely because voters feel they have to decide whether they are pro- or anti-EU, yet mostly feel neither.

These people, wavering halfway between supporting the EU and thinking it’s a bit rubbish in places, seem to lack a convenient moniker. They are neither europhiles nor eurosceptics. But there is a perfect term for them – they are the majority.

What are the economic costs of the EU?

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You can work out the likely impact of a law liberalising the market for product category x on related industries a, b, c, (etc.) and even make an educated guess about the overall impact that this law may have on the economy as a whole.

But when it comes to the economy you can never understand everything – if we’ve learned nothing else in the last 12 months, we’ve learned that. Hell, with something as complex as a continent-wide economic system, there are so many other factors at play, though it may be possible to make an educated guess about the impact of a piece of legislation (enough to judge if it’s going to be beneficial, at any rate), you’ll never be able to track *all* of its effects – countless other things will be affecting individual parts of the economy in countless different ways, from other bits of EU and national legislation (which still often overlap) through local levels of trades unionism, consumer spending patterns, passing fashions, local infrastructure, and so on and so on.

In other words, to be able to put an actual monetary figure on the costs/benefits of EU legislation *as a whole*, you’d first need to work out a system for tracking all the workings of the entire European economy (or, at the very least, the entire economy of the individual member state you want to study). Because without complete understanding how an economy works both at macro- and micro- levels, it is impossible to judge how introducing variable x might affect it – because who’s to say it’s not actually variable b, h or z instead if you haven’t also studied their influence?.

So even more than with claims about the percentages of laws coming from the EU, *any* claims about the costs OR benefits of the EU must be nonsense. Because the only way we could actually tell is if a) we understood the economy of Europe inside-out (which we don’t), and b) we had a control sample of a Europe in which the EU never came into being to which we could compare our findings. We can put a figure on how much we pay in to the EU in the form of taxes, therefore, but we can’t sensibly do the same for the wider economic benefits or costs.

So although I feel that the EU has done more good than harm to both the British economy and the economy of Europe as a whole, there is no way that I can prove that. There’s also no way that anyone of a more eurosceptic bent can prove that the opposite is true. I could point to individual benefits, they could point to individual costs – we could add up more and more of each until we have a wealth of evidence and can start chucking around figures like 200 or 600 billion. But we’d still have only scratched the surface.

This is not a flaw in the way the EU works, it is just a consequence of the EU’s continent-spanning economy (which exists in a world that has become increasingly globalised, and so increasingly economically complex and volatile over the last fifty years) being an incredibly, vastly, inconceivably complicated system that no one can ever fully understand.

It does, however, mean that arguments about the benefits and costs of the EU are always going to come down to subjective feelings, not objective truths. Chuck onto that the fact that most EU legislation is by its nature quite vague (being in the most part a compromise between disparate interest groups from 27 member states, compromised upon yet further during discussions between the European Parliament, Council and Commission), and is often implemented in vastly different ways from member state to member state, depending on the whim of the local authorities, then proving that the EU is beneficial to those who feel that it is not is, therefore, just about an impossible task.

(Modified from a comment left on this post at The Devil’s Kitchen.)

On the EU’s “democratic deficit”

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I’ve been planning a long piece on this for months, ever since that whole openDemocracy thing I did back in the autumn (which is, it turns out, what got me shortlisted for that Reuters award thing, rather than this place), but haven’t quite found the time.

The short version (guaranteed to rile the eurosceptics): nope, the EU’s not democratic – and nor should it be if Britain’s interests are going to be maintained. (I’ll try and explain in more detail at some point, but it’s unlikely to be overly soon…)

Anyway, back to the original starting point for this post. Amongst the usual stuck record of eurosceptic complaints under Timothy Garton-Ash’s latest offering about the EU over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free yesterday (I sometimes read these things just to remind myself why I’m not slipping back into full-on eurosceptic mode, despite the repeated disappointments, annoyances and embarrassments that come with being pro-EU*), this little beauty leapt out, by poster “tooter”. It’s one of the best succinct rejoinders to the perennial “the EU’s not democratic” complaint I’ve seen in quite a while, and echoes many of my own views:

I think this “democratic deficit” thing is overdone. The appointees you are on about are put there by people we elect. Great chunks of our government is run in the same way – the House of Lords being the most glaring example, but there are others, Quangos, the Judiciary (!), the PM (!) to name but a few.

Take one example, the European Central Bank. I read over and over again, as an argument against the Euro, about sinister “faceless bureaucrats” who will run our economy for us from Frankfurt. Well the ECB is accountable to no less than FOUR of the European institutions.

Who is the Bank of England accountable to? Can anybody name even two members of the MPC without googling? Are they not, therefore, “faceless bureaucrats” running our economy from London?

What do the europhobes think we are living in now?

He/she later came back with a quick, even snappier follow-up, reiterating the point:

“We British have something called a “Parliamentary Democracy”, as do most of Europe. We never elect our Prime Minister, we elect Members of Parliament. It is these Members who choose the PM. The PM is an appointee. As are the entire House of Lords. As are the Judiciary. As are the Generals, senior civil servants, heads of Agencies and othe Quangos, the Cabinet, Chief Constables, Bishops etc etc

So, europhobes, how “undemocratic” is the EU again?

I too am intrigued by the answer to this. Because the arguments against the EU employed by eurosceptics who have moved beyond petty patriotism (which, to be fair, is an increasingly large proportion these days – and to be clear I mean patriotism in the strict sense, with no nasty connotations) increasingly revolve around criticisms of inefficiencies and failures that are also invariably present at a national – even local – level of government. Because, after all, no system of government ever devised is perfect.

Yet when it comes to the EU, for the eurosceptics it seems that nothing less than perfection will do.

Or am I being incredibly unfair and/or missing the point?

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* By the way, I really, really need a better term than “pro-EU” to describe my attitude to the whole thing. Because as should be clear to regular readers I’m not a loyal cheerleader for the EU by any means, and advocate fairly radical reform. I remain a supporter of a European Union of some kind, and of close cross-border political and economic co-operation – and in some case integration – of the kind the EU helps facilitate, but not necessarily this European Union.

In the good old days, this would have labelled me a eurosceptic in the true sense (inasmuch as I am sceptical of the benefits of a number of things the EU is doing) – but now that that term has become synonymous with “anti-EU”, what’s left for those of us who are neither europhiles nor eurosceptics, but occupy that vague middle-ground of being largely in favour of EU membership while wishing the whole thing was just a bit, y’know, better? Because that does, after all, account for the attitude of the vast majority of the British population – it seems very odd that there’s not a term for us all…

EU reform: Impossible, a superstate, or multi-tier?

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Richard North at eurosceptic blog par excellence EU Referendum draws my attention to this piece in the Times by William Rees-Mogg, which contains the line:

Most Eurosceptics want Europe to be reformed, not destroyed

This is something of which I remain firmly convinced – but not our man North:

Oh dear! After all these years, and all the failed attempts at seeking “reform”, has it not yet dawned on the man that the EU is incapable of reform[?]

Ignoring the fact that this ignores Rees-Mogg’s actual contention (he doesn’t profess to be in favour of reform himself, merely that a majority favour reform over withdrawal – an unfortunate reality for the withdrawalists of EU Referendum), a question:

How can hardcore anti-EU types maintain that reform is impossible yet simultaneously believe that the EU is heading towards a superstate – which would, in itself, be an immense reform?

North points to an old article in which he explains his logic for rejecting the possibility of EU reform. Yet his “proof” is to refer to an old Milton Friedman article looking at the United States’ Food and Drug Administration, in which Friedman claimed the institution’s very set-up prevented change. Even were this not itself a somewhat dubious contention, backed up more by assertion than by evidence, a monolithic US government agency being compared to a multi-part, multi-country international organisation hardly strikes me as overly fair.

You see the way I reckon it, yes, with current attitudes from the various member states, radical reform is unlikely – just have a gander at the failed compromises that are the Treaty of Nice and Lisbon Treaty, both unsatisfactory to all parties but the best they could manage.

There are several different trains of thought among EU member states as to what the EU should actually be – and whenever efforts to reform come up, as they do on average once a decade, reconciling all these different desires has indeed proved impossible.

But as all major reforms – even after the expansion of qualified majority voting that the Lisbon Treaty brings – still require unanimity, this makes the appearance of an EU superstate all but impossible as long as less integrationist countries remain members (and it’s not just Britain that isn’t keen on ever-closer union).

“OK”, you might think. “So you admit EU reform’s impossible?”

No. Because I reckon the current situation is going to change. How much longer are the likes of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – the core of the original EEC, and still more or less the most enthusiastic member states – going to put up with the frustration of their plans being thwarted? How much longer are those countries who aren’t keen on merging their economies much further going to put up with the perennial drives for greater integration from euroenthusiasts?

We’ve already had countless rhetoric-heavy spats over various aspects of EU reform – not just between Britain and Brussels (as with Thatcher’s battle for the rebate), but between numerous other less fervently federalist member states and the expansionists.

Sooner or later, these clashes are bound to result in an official suggestion of a two-speed or multi-speed Europe – maintaining the union while allowing everyone more or less to go their separate ways.

The idea of a multi-speed Europe is not a new one, and is increasingly gaining ground. Over the last few years, it is a concept that I’ve seen crop up time and again, from House of Lords debates to The Economist, former French president Jaques Chirac to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former Commission president Romano Prodi to the EU’s own website.

As Prodi said in an interview last year:

it is good if you can go forward together, but you cannot go at the speed of the last wagon.

We already have a two-speed Europe. Euro and Schengen are examples of this and they are very important projects. Moreover, a two-speed Europe does not mean that countries that are in the second group cannot move to the first. Two-speed Europe sometimes means more choices.

So, while anti-EU claims that the EU is heading towards a superstate seem to be backed up purely by decades-old (mis)quotes from the likes of Jean Monet (and the occasional modern superstatist aberration like Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker), my hopes that genuine EU reform may be on the cards seem to have rather more to support them.

So then, how can this whole “the EU can’t be reformed” thing – the mantra of all withdrawalists – be justified? The Lisbon Treaty itself is an acknowledgement that the current system is not up to scratch – and an acknowledgement that getting a satisfactory compromise is increasingly difficult (being as it is an unsatisfactory attempt to rectify the previous unsatisfactory compromise that was the Treaty of Nice).

Especially since the failure of the constitution there is an increasing consensus throughout the EU – both among the populations of the member states and increasingly among the EU machine itself – that some serious, radical changes are needed, beyond the mere stop-gap measures that the constitution (and Lisbon Treaty) aimed for.

Introducing a new, multi-tier, multi-speed system (on top of the existing two-tier Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries) is the most obvious – and, most importantly, easiest – way to give everyone what they want. I see no reason why it won’t eventually happen – the only question is how long is it going to take?

Why I’m (largely) pro-EU

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Nutty eurosceptics are always good for a giggle, but can be deeply frustrating for the more sensible anti-EU types, as Tory MEP Daniel Hannan has recently discovered following his (rather silly) expulsion from the EPP – and as those who attended the Pro-Referendum Rally a few months back also found out when they found themselves associating with BNP thugs, middle-aged women dressed as Britannia, and shouty conspiracy theorists.

After all, who wants to be associated with the kinds of historically, constitutionally and legally ignorant, utterly deluded (and highly hilarious) ravings of Telegraph comments section regular “Magna Carta” and his ilk, with their propensity for spewing out gems like this (from the comments to that Hannan piece):

Now that the Queen has abdicated and become a citizen of the EU republic what happens to all the lands the Crown owns…

These lands will become part of the assets of the EU republic.

45,000.000.000 dollars worth.

This will be used for the benifit of the EU and not of the British Commonwealth.

What most people do not know about is that the EU will then have a claim to New York and Washington DC USA.

Washington DC is in the Countie of Stafford and i come from Stafford shire England. Us to be known as Stafford countie. from the Earls of Essex and Ewe Duke of Buckingham,s lands.

Our family gave the first White House to the American people which is still standing in New York to day.

For similar insanity, check out the message boards of leading (and intermittently rather good) anti-EU blog EU Referendum pretty much any day of the week.

Raving EU conspiracy theories abound (I’ve even come up with a few myself), and are usually good for a giggle. But it can be exasperating for the more rational anti-EU types – of whom I know many. Indeed, it was largely the more maniacal anti-EU lunatics that first set me on the path to supporting British membership after a lifetime being fairly hardcore anti-EU. (The specific initial reason for my defecting to the pro-EU camp was, if I recall, a particularly smug and stupid article about something to do with the EU by Peter Oborne that appeared in the Spectator.)

But every now and then, it works the other way. Such as when you find out that Patricia Hewitt is likely to be Britain’s next European Commissioner (via), or whenever former Europe Minister Dennis MacShane opens his mouth.

I’ve never subscribed to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. I do, however, reckon that if my friends all turn out to be morons, it’s worth thinking about joining the enemy. This is why I keep voting for different parties at pretty much every election. (Though I used to claim I was voting FOR specific policies or candidates, I’ve realised that I’ve actually always been voting AGAINST something.)

The way the EU’s been going recently, I’m getting increasingly tempted to switch back to being anti-EU again. I mean, just imagine if the British Commissioner was Patricia Hewitt and the President of the EU was Tony Blair… How could I, without massive hypocrisy, support such an organisation?

But then I remember the nutters in the other camp, and turn back. Currently, I find myself huddled in a shell hole in No Man’s Land, bayonet fixed. Nonetheless, I remain significantly closer to the pro-EU lines than the anti – with my gun trained sometimes forwards, sometimes back, firing off shots at anyone stupid enough to put their head above the trenches on either side.

Because, let’s face it, no one political party or ideology has all the answers. To think otherwise is to go in for a form of secular religion that’s just as dogmatic and stupid as anything the bishops, rabbis and mullahs have ever come up with. A series of loose alliances with groups that reflect aspects of your belief is by far the better course – and never commit all-out.

Sitting in No Man’s Land may mean you get shot by both sides (and yes, I have been attacked by both europhiles and europhobes in my time), but at least you’re free to follow your own orders, rather than feeling obliged to charge over the top with the rest of the herd as soon as your chosen leader blows his whistle. Times change, opinions change, – it’s the height of naive arrogance to assume that you’ll always think the same way, and (as far as I’m concerned) simply pathetic to follow the party line rather than your conscience.

Tackling the euro popularity deficit

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Another one to get the sceptics all upset – a call for a propaganda campaign to convince people that the euro is great and stuff. From the report (.doc download) it looks like some of our more economically-minded anti-EU brethren could have some fun with this:

“the benefits of a single currency and its accompanying instruments – a single monetary policy and enhanced co-ordination of economic policies – cannot be seriously questioned at this stage”

I mean, I’ll freely admit to having little knowledge of economics and even I know that’s a silly claim to make.

There’s also the assertion that “polls in new Member States also reflect some scepticism to the adoption of the euro caused primarily by a lack of relevant information” (my emphasis).

Lack of information is not the issue – it’s lack of a detailed knowledge, understanding and ability to interpret the relationship between macroeconomics and individual prosperity.

I’d say that the dodgy situations of Italy and Germany, both Eurozone members, is probably in itself reason enough to be a tad sceptical about the benefits. And it’s entirely reasonable for the average punter to look at the apparent short-term impact of the new currency on those states which have adopted it, even if the hopeful assertion is that, long-term, it will be beneficial to all – and even if the short-term impact may only be a perceived one.

What else, after all, can they base their judgement on? They certainly aren’t going to trust “information campaigns” funded by an organisation with a vested interest to see the thing work. Bias in economic analysis is among the worst sort, for economics is basically a science. You wouldn’t trust the findings of a creationist study of evolution which concluded that evolution is a load of bollocks, so why would you trust an EU-funded study which concluded that the euro is great?

In any case, a propaganda campaign is not the way forwards, as it assumes a popular hostility which flies in the face of the facts. I seriously reckon that, when you get down to it, the issue of euro resistance is not one of nationalism. Naturally there is a strong traditionalist attachment to national currencies – especially one as strong and successful as the pound. But what the majority of people want is not so much the coins they’re used to jangling in their pockets, but simply a comfortable standard of living.

The issue of the Queen’s head on our currency has long since been sidestepped by – erm – each member of the Eurozone being able to have national symbols on their money. And the experience of switching from L.s.d. in the seventies shows that everyone can cope with a far more complex currency changeover than a simple shift from one metric system to another would be. (The issue of metric weighting is somewhat different, what with money being an arbitrary construct dependant on many variables and weight actually relating to something tangible and constant and all, but that doesn’t really bear on this issue, thankfully.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the largely abstract notions of national identity are not as strong or as binding as the desire to get food on the table as cheaply as possible. If the euro could be demonstrated to cut our bills and make life in general cheaper, we would – bar a few “patriotic” extremists – be up for it.

This is why, of Gordon Brown’s famous (yet never sufficiently remembered) five economic tests, the only one that really matters to the average man on the street is the last – “Would joining the euro promote higher growth, stability and a lasting increase in jobs?” That test cannot be passed with a propaganda campaign – and until it is any propaganda campaign will fail.

The real question, of course, is whether the euro can ever achieve all that has been claimed for it. As of yet, there is little in the way of overwhelming evidence to support claims that the euro – and, importantly, the euro alone – has been responsible for “price stability, low mortgage rates, easier travel, protection against exchange rate fluctuations and external shocks” as that report asserts. There is also little overwhelming evidence of the opposite. But when it comes to this sort of thing, better the devil you know is a fair enough line to take until the evidence becomes overwhelming. The evidence isn’t yet overwhelming – hence Gordon still saying his tests aren’t passed – so no one but the most fervently ideological is going to be convinced. That simple.