The Moment of Truth

Sometime in the next two or three years, the British people will have to cast the most important single vote in their history - whether or not to join the single currency.

If we vote "yes" to the Euro, no one can any longer doubt that this would mean signing up to far more than just a single currency. In recent months German and other continental politicians could not have spelled it out more clearly. They want "full political union". If Britain wishes to stay on board, by voting to join the single currency, we would also be voting for Britain to become part of a United States of Europe.

If that is what the British people want, at least the must do it with their eyes open. They must realise it means giving up for ever the right to run their own country, or make their own laws. They would instead become a fifteenth part of this vast new state, that is far too unwieldy to allow any meaningful democracy.

We must now face up to just what it will mean if we decide not to join the Euro. We will be left in a very odd position indeed. Britain wil be stuck; half in this new country called Europe and half out. We would be like the pantomime horse with a head at each end; one facing one way, one the other. Such a situation would be unworkable and just as intolerable to the other EU members as to the British people themselves. A "no" vote in the referendum would mean that sooner or later our whole relationship with the EU would have to change dramatically. Even to the point where we would have to consider pulling out altogether.

Before our politicians go weak-kneed at the thought, let us put to them some tough and long overdue questions. Why, for instance, to justify Britain's membership of the EU, does it seem necessary for them to pretend that we are still the poor, struggling country we were 30 years ago? Repeatedly in recent months Government ministers have assured us that Britain is "the fourth poorest country in the EU". Why don't they have the honesty to tell us that Britain now has the fourth largest economy in the world? Or that, after Germany, we are just ahead of France as the second richest country in Europe?

Why do they try to hide the astonishing changes which came over Britain's economy in the 1980s, making us one of the most successful, competitive tRading nations in the world - changes which our over-subsidised, over-taxed, over-regulated continental neighbors can only look at in envy; changes which are now increasingly put at risk, as we have to knuckle under to all the ever-rising costs and regulations imposed on us b the bureaucrats of Brussels?

No one suggest we should stop doing business with our EU neighbours. The last thing they would want is to shut out our goods, since they profit from that trade far more than we do. In the past ten years they have mad a staggering £130,000 million more from selling to us than we have from them. Without our profits from trading with the rest of the world we would long since have gone bankrupt.

In business terms, the simple fact is that we could survive perfectly well outside the EU. But make no mistake. This is what the battle over Britain joining the Euro is all about; either we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into helping our neighbours build that new political superstate or we re-negotiate our future relationship with them. We can then take our future back into our own hands: trading with them: staying on friendly terms with them; but no longer part of the vast political experiment they now seem determined to carry to its conclusion.

We have arrived at the moment of truth. There is no halfway house.

Our politicians may not be telling us this yet, because the years of fudge and evasion have so blinded them to the reality of what is going on. But such is the awesome reality of the choice the British people must now prepare themselves to make.