"Launching the single currency marks a turning point for Europe and is crucial to stability, high growth and employment,” declared Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, in March 1998.

“The euro’s opponents are disheartened as their predictions of chaos and disaster haven’t materialized,” observed former Conservative chancellor Kenneth Clarke in October 2002, as British euro cheerleaders, many disgracefully opposing a referendum, were still pushing us to join.

“The euro is a protection shield against the crisis,” claimed then EU President Jose Manuel Barroso in February 2010, the Portuguese Maoist-turned-Communist-turned-Brussels-careerist seemingly unaware that sovereign bond yields were already flashing red across the eurozone “periphery”. The likes of Spain, Portugal and Greece were struggling to remain solvent, their national balance sheets already weak from years of over-spending, then crushed by the gargantuan losses of hubristic, politically-powerful banks in the aftermath of the 2008 sub-prime collapse.

It’s easy, as we contemplate financial disaster in Greece this weekend, to say: “I told you so”. It’s easy to assert, yet again, as we flirt with another “Lehman moment”, that economic theory and practical common sense dictate, and have always dictated, that national democracies sharing one currency and one central bank will always, eventually, come to blows.

It’s worth remembering, though, that those of us who railed against the likes of Blair, Clarke and Barroso for their dangerous rhetorical nonsense, who dared to defy the mainstream pro-euro consensus, were pilloried for our trouble. To be against UK euro membership was – until a few years ago, when the continental bond-market spams began – to be dismissed as a xenophobe or crank.

David Fuller's view

Here is a PDF of Liam Halligan's article.