European Affairs

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue, and I shall address it later. For now, however, I want to return to the point about reverse salami slicing, which will bring power back to this country. We know that no more power can go, because the Conservatives will promise a referendum on any future transfer of power. We now have a ridiculous situation, with this Government, in their last few months, still saying, unbelievably, that this country should go into the euro. Why can the Minister for Europe not say that that policy is redundant—largely, of course, thanks to the campaigning all those years ago by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks? The Government are to go into the next general election saying when those mythical conditions are met they will go into the euro—but the fact that we have not been in the euro has kept this recession from being worse than it is. In Wellingborough, double the number of people are unemployed now than when Labour came to power, but the situation would have been much worse if we had been in the euro.