Letter: Don't bet on EMU

Don't bet on EMU

Sir: Sir Simon Gourlay deplores the Government's delay in entering the EMU (Letters, 11 September), and its commitment to such niceties as consulting the electorate on their future. The EMU, he says, "is going to happen and it will be made to work".

I wonder if he would invest most of his personal wealth in a new company whose prospectus depended on such bald assertions, many of whose directors already ran businesses with poor results, big debts and much sharp practice, and whose finance director was to be unaccountable to board and shareholders alike?

He rightly says that we "currently have precious little influence" on the EMU. The familiar and fallacious implication is that, by becoming the twelfth member state, we would have more influence. In fact, despite the UK being a G7 economy, we would have the same influence as the likes of Luxembourg and Portugal. Moreover, the unformed European Central Bank is designed not to be influenced by or accountable to anyone.

Despite our membership of the EU, we still have a fair degree of control over our political and economic future. Anyone who believes that there can be no viable future outside the EMU presumably expects the world to coalesce into a handful of regional superpowers run by bureaucratic governments beyond effective democratic control such as the European Commission and the ECB.

M J KNIGHT

Slough,

Berkshire