By Matthew McGregor
The question of whether to join the euro is the most important political decision to face Britain in fifty years. Along with a lot of young people, I believe that joining the Euro now shouldn't be the priority for the government. Sorting out the student funding issue and dealing with other issues that people really care should come first.
The debate over whether to adopt the euro as our currency or not has been dogged by slogans, smears and sound bites. The time has come for an open and honest debate on the costs and implications of giving up the pound.
Being opposed to joining the euro is more than about any notion of nationhood, or of sovereignty. More and more people are coming to understand that joining the euro would have a real effect on standards of living. This is no different for students.
There are very strict rules which we would need to abide by if we joined the euro. These are set out in the misnamed Stability and Growth Pact. These rules include limits on public spending by ensuring that government budgets are balanced every year - whether that makes economic sense or not. In the rest of the EU they have achieved this feat by privatising swathes of public services and by cutting back their welfare states. The French government hopes to raise €8bn from privatisations, while Ireland is facing cuts of almost €300m across its public services.
In the UK we are now for the first time in almost thirty years, investing in our public services in a substantial way. In order to avoid having to scale that investment back to an extent that would see them rightly booted from government, Gordon Brown has increased Public Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships. These schemes ensure new hospitals and schools are built without adding a penny to the Government's accounts. Private companies are brought in to make initial investments, and are then paid off in stages for years to come. In order to keep within the eurozone spending rules the government ensures that investment costs don't show on the books. But by doing this the government has mortgaged the future and committed our generation to higher taxes for lower standards of service.
One of the best examples of this is the education sector. The government has ordered Universities to increase its use of private finance in order to get public spending down to EU acceptable levels. As the government body which funds Universities says: "In the past the funds for replacing and expanding the infrastructure requirements [of Universities] came directly from the public purse, but this has now changed. Directly-targeted public funds now only provide a very small fraction of the requirements, and the Government has made it clear that it looks to universities and colleges to make greater use of private finance."
Nowhere is this clearer than at Universities like Sheffield - where I was the Union's Education Officer last year - and at Hertfordshire where private finance is being used to subsidise under funded institutions. Student Unions are also facing cuts with De Montford students knowing as well as anyone the consequences of lower subventions.
The same is true for public services in general. After years of under investment, the current government was elected on a mandate of making substantial investment. Getting the NHS back on track is the reason most people gave for voting Labour again in 2001. But even Gordon Brown himself, says that to join the euro immediately would mean up to £20bn knocked off public service investment. The government was elected to increase spending on the schools and hospitals, not cut it so it would embark on adventures which only really interest the Westminster elite.
But what the debate comes down to more than anything is one thing that is important to everyone - students or people at work, young or old, right-wing or left-wing - and that's democracy. If we don't like the way the government is funding public services, paying for education or treating levying taxes, we vote them out. With the euro those decisions are taken even further away from us. Imagine if your University set you bar prices instead of the students you elected to run your Union. The University might set the right prices, but they might not. And if it's not going the way you want it to, you can do nothing about. If the last general election taught us anything, it showed that people will not take part in the process if they think they will not make a difference. By removing power over the economy from the people elect - and can remove - to people that are totally unaccountable, we will encourage cynicism and disengagement. Let's not lock ourselves into a currency that may not be in our best interests, once we're in there's no way out.
And don't let anyone kid you that being opposed to the euro makes you a Tory. The No Campaign is a cross-party campaign that has involved members of all political parties and none. We are supported by Trade Unions, business leaders, diplomats, celebrities, economists and thousands of ordinary voters. If you would like more information on the no campaign, or you would like to know more about the issues, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
You get more information from the no campaign website: www.no-euro.com
