Hard currency means hard labour for EU workers!
You are about to be Euro'd!
THE MEDIA hype over the City slickers having to work over the New Year bank holidays to set up the systems for the launch of the Euro in world markets from January 4 should have given us all a clue.
Whether the new currency rises from its initial 70p valuation, or falls, the City of London, the banks and the big employers stand to make a packet buying, selling and speculating with a new global currency.
But while the bankers will pocket any profits, the costs of the exercise will fall fair and square on the working class in the EU countries – beginning with the eleven nations which have joined the Euro, handing over key economic decisions to an unelected board of bankers.
Regardless of the impact on jobs, living standards and welfare services, the priority of the new European Central Bank is to guarantee the value of the currency and control inflation. The result is likely to be a continued squeeze on welfare and public spending, while European bosses celebrate their new freedoms by indulging in a new round of rationalisation.
But the effects do not stop there. Britain’s New Labour government has barely concealed its eagerness to join the new currency, and is softening up public opinion in readiness.
To some extent our economy has already been "Euro’d", as two Gordon Brown budgets have rigidly enforced the Maastricht criteria, squeezing public spending and promoting the ruinously expensive Private Finance Initiative in the NHS, education and other public services.
For Tony Blair’s team, there is an extra attraction in moving swiftly towards monetary union. Not only could they link up British and European capital, and please many of their existing business backers, but they could steal a march on William Hague’s befuddled Tory Party, which has now painted itself firmly into a corner by rejecting EMU for the indefinite future.
As growing sections of British business make clear their ambition to join the Euro, this could mean that Blair could establish new Labour as the political wing of a sizeable section of previous Tory sponsors – and as a result cut himself even further adrift from Labour’s trade union roots.
Whichever way you look, the Euro brings serious new threats to the working class movement throughout the continent. The need for an internationalist, socialist fightback has never been greater.