The Euro has proved an absolute economic and political disaster. France has 2.5 million unemployed, Germany has at least 5 million unemployed and the euro-zone as a whole has unemployment rates 3 times that of the UK. Politically the French, German and especially the Irish Governments just will not accept the authority of the Euro and the European Commission – so they break the rules! Indeed even the President of the European Commission has said that the Euro-zone rules are “stupid” – but no one can do anything about them because they can only be changed by unanimity, which is unattainable!
One of the few areas where the eurofanatic believes he can show the “failure” of Britain outside the Euro was in foreign inward investment. The eurofanatic is also a corporatist and so he thinks that Government “organisation” and subsidy of foreign investment into Britain must be a good thing (in fact the State’s activities have been pretty disastrous with all the distortions one could expect from State subsidies – paid for by British companies – to foreign competitors!). Inward investment if it is to be wise and productive is like any other form of investment (outward or internal investment by British companies for instance) – it must be rational, not distorted by the short-term idiocies of politicians.
Foreign investment into the UK has recently fallen – both because there has been a marked cooling of the international economy and probably also because Britain has had a surfeit of foreign investment in recent decades (typically more than all the other EU countries combined).
But now an Ernst and Young report shows that Britain is still by far the most attractive home for inward investment into the EU. It is significant that the best place to invest in the EU is a country which has not surrendered its currency and economy to the EU!
Despite the recession the UK has managed to raise its share of the EU’s inward investment to 28% of the total, London remains the most popular region for investment in the whole of the EU and Britain overtook France as the top destination for manufacturing investment.
And if we take just those (12) countries which have adopted the Euro (thereby abolishing their currency, central bank etc etc) inward investment actually fell 13% last year. So much for the advantages of one currency, one interest rate, one inflation rate and one market! In fact of course despite the constitutional creation of “a single economy” by political fantasists it does not exist in reality – and so the euro-economy is collapsing. Therefore fewer wish to invest in it.
Even the EU itself admits that between 2000 and 2050 the EU’s hare of world output will fall from 18% to 10%. The growth and economic prospects for Britain – the world’s greatest trading nation – are therefore clearly in the rest of the world and not in the EU. That process is well under way and despite the fall in share prices in the USA that economy achieved one third more growth between 1996 and 2002 than the EU.
The IMF has condemned the management of the Euro-zone and predicted that for the 3rd year running the Euro economy will fail to establish a sustained recovery. The head of the “Bundesbank” (yes these civil servants manage to keep a job even when there is no longer such a thing as the German Central Bank!) has admitted that Germany is “basically stagnating”.
The Euro will continue to destroy its constituent economies until it either collapses (with the withdrawal of Germany as the probable first step) or a military regime (the European Army) declares a state of emergency and wipes out what remains of the nation states replacing them with a “rational” central dictatorship.
The Euro cannot work because:
1. The real purpose of the European Union is to abolish the nation states politically and constitutionally and the Euro is the final step in that process. This is unacceptable to democratic nations and they will re-assert their sovereignty.
2. There is not and will never be a “single European Market”.
3. The structures, interests and cycles of the 15 economies (never mind the future 25!) are massively different.
4. There is an unbridgeable gulf between market economics and free trade on the one hand and the centralised corporatism of EU states like France Germany and Belgium (they have even fallen out with the others on defence).
5. France Germany and Italy each have between 3 and 4 times as much industrial subsidy as Britain – despite nearly 50 years of a so called “common market”.
6. The peoples of Europe will in the long run not accept the surrender of democratic sovereignty required to run one European economy. They have already deserted the ballot boxes in protest. The next stage is violence on the streets – already begun in Berlin and Paris.
7. Long term unemployment as a percentage of all unemployment is 4% in France 4% in Germany and 6.5% in Italy. In Britain, outside the eurozone, it is only1.5%
For more details of the impossibility of the Euro see the leaflet “The Euro means….” from Publications on this site, £7 per 100 from Compuprint Publishing, Unit B, West View Terrace, St Omers Road, Gateshead, NE11 9EL, United Kingdom. Overseas add £4 post and packing.
