Britain is not a small, weak country. Our economy is huge - the fourth largest in the western world. We sit at the tables of the International Monetary Fund in our own right. If we joined the euro, our influence would shrink, not grow. For we would forfeit our individual representatives in favour of a single voice from Euroland.
Unemployment has more than halved and inflation, too, has dropped sharply.
According to conventional free-market economics, this could not happen for two reasons. First, large falls in unemployment ought to lead to higher, not lower, inflation. Just over a year ago, for example, Gavyn Davies, chief economist at Goldman Sachs pronounced that unemployment had to rise by half a million to prevent inflation rising. But both inflation and unemployment have continued to fall. Second, the effects of a currency devaluation on output and employment ought to be purely temporary.