Jason Nissé: For all this talk of a euro referendum, will it be 'no, no Yvette'?

In Portugal, where the government has been warning about unscrupulous shopkeepers using the introduction of the euro to hide price rises, they are up in arms about parking tickets. Apparently local authorities have been using the same euro ruse to penalise motorists and up their income on the sly.

The issue of euro inflation has become a topic of intense debate in Germany, where Bild, the German version of The Sun, has led a fierce campaign (though official statisticians argue the figures are hardly significant). According to Bild, an increasing number of Germans wish they still had the deutschmark. Similar feelings of nostalgia have afflicted people across the eurozone, while in Sweden the oppo- site sensation is to the fore, with many wishing the krona away, yet the European Central Bank is not sure the Swedish economy is ready for monetary union.

But all this disagreement about the euro will be as nothing to the debate over breakfast at the Ed Balls-Yvette Cooper household. The brilliant young former journalist and economics guru, Mr Balls, is a well-known eurosceptic credited – or is it blamed? – with turning his boss, Gordon Brown, against the idea of the pound joining the single currency. His wife, Ms Cooper, is the brilliant former journalist and economics guru who has just been moved from the Department of Health to the Lord Chancellor's Office, charged with overseeing the euro referendum. One can only presume she was put there by our europhile Prime Minister because there is going to be a euro referendum. Otherwise it would be a complete waste of a talented minister's time.

So can we read into this move that the fudgeable five tests have now been hurdled and we are hurtling towards a referendum? Or is this another false start in the interminable saga of "will we, won't we" that has characterised the debate in the five years since Labour came to power?

The irony of this, of course, is that had Mr Blair had the guts to go for a euro referendum straight after winning the 1997 election, we would be in the single currency. We have lower interest rates, even higher house prices and would be moaning about how shops (and local authorities) were surreptitiously raising prices under the cloak of the new currency.

A case of social insecurity

The euro isn't the only area where New Labour lost its nerve in the months after gaining power. Does anyone remember Frank Field's brief tenure as a social security minister, supposedly "thinking the unthinkable" to sort out the problem of Britain's unfunded pension liabilities?

His frank thinking was so unpalatable to Mr Blair (and more importantly Mr Brown) that he was pitched out of office. He was followed shortly afterwards by his boss, Harriet Harman, to be replaced by the safe hands of Alistair Darling.

It might be unfair to say Mr Darling sat on these safe hands for most of the three years he spent at the Department of Work and Pensions (as it's now known). But these intractable issues appear no closer to solution and the only big initiative has been a Treasury-sponsored launch of stakeholder pensions. To put the best gloss on it, only 750,000 have been sold so far, against a target of 2.5 million.

Many have ruminated on the large tasks ahead for Mr Darling at the Department of Transport. But if anything, he has bequeathed even bigger problems to Andrew Smith, his successor. Mr Smith is, by all accounts, one of the most boring people ever to reach the Cabinet, a man for whom management consultant-speak is his lingua franca. Some of the issues he will have to face are detailed on page 10, and added to these is a big banana skin: the supposed launch next April of electronic delivery of social security payments.

Not only does this initiative, even more delayed than anything Stephen Byers was involved with, require the Post Office to successfully deliver a big technology project (fill in the blanks yourself), it needs a hiccup-free launch of the famous Universal Bank. This will be a Post Office-administered, commercial bank-funded, plastic card-based service for those who do not already have bank accounts. Publicly, everyone says it will work; privately, no one does. No one even knows how many customers it is likely to have: targets range from two million to eight million.

It is understood Mr Smith celebrated his promotion with a cheese and tomato pizza. He'll need something stronger when the Universal Bank project falls apart.

j.nisse@independent.co.uk