Letter: The euro is no magic bullet

YOUR LEADER "Tories lose the plot" (11 October) says that it is hard to see how the euro could be a failure (however that is measured). For one thing, you say the EU population is a bit bigger than the US's. On that basis, Indonesia and Russia are rather serious contenders, but the future obviously belongs basically to China - a fallacy which many financial gurus and their gullible investors have lately discovered to their cost. And what does Japan matter, really? The euro will produce "a large, stable market". What stability is there in an EMU where most large members failed to meet the supposedly continuing stability criteria even before the euro is started, and even before the wheels recently came off the global financial system? Why should the euro be immune to currency volatility when the US dollar is not? If a single currency is such a magic bullet, why are economic circumstances so different in London and Londonderry?

If the euro, and the EMU that it represents, fail, it will be because they are driven by a political agenda, hidden from us in 1971, by a cabal of politicians with conflicting motives and a common contempt for their electorates. In each case, someone else is meant to pay for the electoral IOUs they made to justify their failed attempts to meet their prudent "Maastricht" criteria.

There is no "ratchet of history" inevitably pulling this G7 country towards submersion in a Union run by "one size fits all" bureaucrats in Brussels and Frankfurt. There is, though, a deluge of disinformation (poor, lonely little Britain) and a defeatist view that we would be richer and safer leaving our governance to these heroes from nowhere. The logical conclusion of the ratchet theory is that the world will condense into a few superpowers. Recent history actually suggests otherwise.

MJ KNIGHT

Langley, Berkshire