The challenges facing the ailing eurozone, where inflation unexpectedly ticked up yesterday, vividly illustrate why Britain was right to steer clear 25 years ago, a former MEP who campaigned vociferously against the idea has said.
But Rupert Lowe, a former Brexit Party MEP, believes Britain is still not reaping the full benefits of life outside the bloc – because it remains shackled to EU rules in too many areas.
As a member of the Referendum Party in 1997, Mr Lowe campaigned alongside Sir James Goldsmith in 1997, when the issue was firmly on the agenda. After the election of that year, resulting in a Labour landslide, HMT Treasury, concluded that Britain’s economy was not ready for membership, with then-Chancellor Gordon Brown believed to have vetoed the idea.
The Referendum Party, which called for a referendum on the European Union which happened 20 years later, only took 2.6 percent of the vote – but is widely reckoned to have deprived the Tories of up to 16 seats.
Mr Lowe, now the business spokesman for Reform UK, told Express.co.uk: “I played my part. That was about saving the pound and it worked, although it cost Jimmy Goldsmith £50million and he never got the credit he deserved for that.
“All three parties in 97 – the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats – were going to sign up for the euro then we would have been roped-down like Gulliver if we’ve done that.
“Now, the only possible reason you could have made for not leaving the EU, the only intellectual reason for not leaving was you say to yourself, ‘Why would you leave a club where you’ve got an advantage over everybody else and you still got your own currency?’
“In other words, why don’t you carry on as a member of the club with your own currency playing the game?
“But that’s not what the British people voted to do. They voted to leave, quite clearly.
“And leaving means taking back our self-determination, taking back our sovereignty, making laws that are in the interests of the British people, not the European people.
“Because the government basically represents the British people. It doesn’t represent Europe anymore. We trade with Europe, but its primary responsibility is to the welfare and wealth of the British people.”
Mr Lowe, the former chairman of Southampton FC, added: “It is good to see the British economy performing better than Europe. We always thought that would happen.
“But that’s even though all we are now as a sovereign nation, we haven’t actually taken back self-determination from all the laws and the red tape which holds back British business.
“So what we’re doing is we’re actually we are doing well in spite of the fact that our government has failed to deliver Brexit. Imagine, imagine what would happen if we actually had Brexit?”
Yesterday’s inflation figure of 2.9 percent figure, released by the European Central Bank, was up from the 2.4 percent recorded in November – albeit well down from the peak of 10.6 percent in October 2022. It follows seven straight monthly declines, but ECB President Christine Lagarde believes the figure will keep rising for months.
Separately, a monthly survey of manufacturers throughout the eurozone compiled by S&P Global and published earlier this week painted what Dr Cyrus de la Rubia, Chief Economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank (HCOB), described as a “bleak picture”.
The report used questionnaires sent to 3,000 private sector companies to calculate performance on a scale of one to 100, the higher the better. Greece’s figure of 51.3 is the highest in four months, but every other country (Ireland 48.9, Spain 46, Italy 45.3, Netherlands 44.8, Germany 43.3, France 42.1 and Austria 42.0) is below 50.
The figure for France is at a 43-month low, while the figure for the 19-member eurozone as a whole is 44.4.
