Funny money
Michael Vestey
Having ordered my newly printed euros for a trip to Italy this week I find they are peculiar little things; they don't really feel like proper money at all. As someone said on the radio after they were launched on New Year's Day, they're rather like monopoly money, an apt simile as sometimes the EU itself is not dissimilar to the eponymous game, though without the harmless fun.
Listening to the hyperbole in the radio coverage of this event was rather like hearing overheated religious people describing the Second Coming. The BBC, swiftly recognising another kindred and bloated white elephant, concentrated on the euphoria or, as it has been called, europhoria in the EU countries' capitals. If only their reporters had been in the little Umbrian mediaeval town where I am now they might have seen a different picture.
My friend Tim discovered a queue of contadini complaining at the post office that their pensions were being paid in funny money. As he observed, `Wim Duisenberg never grasped that these people don't buy newspapers and probably don't have radios or TVs either.' At the butcher there was chaos. The first estimate in euros for a small leg of lamb and some wild boar sausages would, Tim said, have bought a four-course meal at the Danieli in Venice. The butcher, his wife and an assistant produced three different results in euros, all wrong, but after much heaving of shoulders and eyes raised heavenwards, agreement was reached. Two other shops quoted prices in lire, gave change in lire, and remarked only on the nice weather.
The shops, of course, in rural Italy did not have any euro coins so paid change in lire. Customers, sensing a fiddle, pay in lire on the not unreasonable grounds that, if the shop isn't using euros. nor will they. I heard none of this on BBC Radio before I left. On Radio Four's The World This Weekend on New Year's Eve the pro-euro propaganda barrage began in earnest. The Lib-Dem's Charles Kennedy urged Tony Blair to give a lead or, he said mysteriously, Britain would be 'washed up on the beaches as some kind of country club member'.
Michael Heseltine was next up to answer the question why Blair wasn't calling for a referendum now. 'He's fearful of the very largely North American-owned newspapers in this country and the public opinion that's influenced by them.' I've long suspected that Hese!tine and the other obsessive Europhiles are patronising and contemptuous of electorates and this remark proved it, as if we can't make up our own minds without having to read the Telegraph or Times to tell us what to think.
On Today the following morning some tame interviews by Jim Naughtie with the French Europe minister and our dismal equivalent Peter Hain were followed by a spirited interview by Sarah Montague — she of the sublime voice — with Edward Heath who immediately produced the bogus figure that 80 per cent of those in Europe were in favour of the euro. At least Montague, a new and much welcome addition to the Today team, tried to challenge him but Heath lives in such a Euro-fantasy world he can no longer answer a straight question without resorting to falsehoods.
Last Sunday morning Broadcasting House, the normally eccentric news and current affairs programme, actually produced, for once, a rather interesting discussion on the euro. Peter Oborne, the political editor of this magazine, was eloquent in his arguments against Britain adopting the euro, pointing out that the Governor of the Bank of England had enough difficulty setting an interest rate for both the north and south of England without the European Bank's one-size-fits-all rate for the whole of Europe. For Britain to join the euro and see unemployment doubling here as a result of an interest rate straitjacket 'was worse than economic lunacy, it's a crime'.
A Euro-fanatic in Brussels, Jackie Davis, the editor of a magazine that promotes the EU, almost began to ululate in favour of the euro. I thought she might faint with religious fervour. If Joan of Arc did indeed hear the voices of St Michael, St Catherine and St Margaret telling her to rescue Paris from the English then Davis must hear the voices of St Jean Monnet, St Robert Schuman and St Jacques Delors in her head each day.
Her level of self-delusion is astonishingly high. 'Once you get past outdated perceptions of symbolism many will find they are confusing sovereignty with isolation,' she gushed. Taxation is symbolism is it? And if we're isolated by remaining outside the euro zone why do EU countries enthusiastically import more from us than we export to them?
Incidentally, watch out for that word 'symbolism'. The Euro-fanatics now use it pejoratively to dismiss the precious apparatus of democracy that we still cling to. Oh dear, what a relief to be in dear old muddled Umbria examining a fresco the builders have unexpectedly uncovered in my appartamento.
Previous page
