In praise of Mr Clarke's plain-speaking on the euro

No sooner did Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, call on the Government to end the conspiracy of silence on the euro than Charles Clarke, the Labour Party chairman, duly obliged.

In his interview in our pages today, he becomes the first Cabinet minister to discuss the date of a possible referendum on the euro. If the Treasury's economic tests are met, and a timetable has been set which means a verdict will be reached by next June, then the British people are "likely" to be asked the big question in October 2003.

But Mr Clarke does not merely discuss the mechanics of making that historic decision. As a politician not given to evasion, he is refreshingly direct in arguing the case for a Yes vote. That case is not merely a practical one of economic interest. The economic argument is strong enough, but it is essentially one of balancing the long-term benefits of stability and ease of access to the single market against the costs of adjustment, which in itself will be easier once Britain has joined. The decisive argument, for Mr Clarke as it is for this newspaper, is that of Britain's influence in Europe. As he says, adopting the euro would give this country a much greater say in the economic decisions of the eurozone. And if that argument is true, "the sooner we're in the better".

He slips inadvertently into euro-jargon with the claim that Britain is now, much more than it was under the Conservatives, a "positive force in the European settlement", but we know what he means. It is a matter of more than simple self-interest, but of wider cultural horizons. And we know how much more this country could be a positive force if it shared Europe's currency.

It is often observed that Mr Clarke is an outrider in the Cabinet for the views of the Prime Minister, a way for Tony Blair to work around the caution of his Chancellor. But the time is fast approaching when such devices cannot be sustained. At Blackpool next week Mr Blair needs to make the case for the euro in similarly blunt, Clarkeian terms.