WILL HUTTON : EURO-LOONIE.

Listening to the self-appointed economic expert, Will Hutton, the other day, I wonder how he has achieved the eminence that he has.

He believes that the UK was wrong not to join the Euro; he thinks that we will eventually regret this to such an extent that we will beg to join because our future will be determined by the disparate members of this group. He says that debts only matter when they are crystallized - does he not understand that this is actually what has happened ? He talks about the countries working hard to make the Euro work when what is actually the case is that the politicians have done the work in order to avoid their own crushing embarrassment, while the people would rather have nothing to do with it. 

What planet does he live on ? The Eurozone is a construct based on so many impossible assumptions that it cannot continue to exist in any realistic form. The only way that the Eurozone can survive is if the Germans continue to support most of the poorer nations by giving them vast amounts of financial support, or the European Central Bank prints enormous quantities of unsupported currency, leading to eventual hyper-inflation - are either of these scenarios going to happen ? Politically, the Eurozone has to survive, while realistically it is dead on its feet. Hutton is right in believing that Britain has a tough time ahead and he may be right that the Eurozone will show a tendency towards recovery in the next few years, but their recovery will be slow, difficult and quite probably with fewer members than now; he believes that Britain's recovery will be much more problematic unless we tie ourselves more closely to the Euro. The truth surely is that the whole European experiment is doomed to failure and will inevitably be overtaken by the rapid expansion of the developing economies of China, India, Russia and Brazil, as well as by the enormous growth in the populations of most of the 'Third World' over the next century. Europe is destined to be overrun by immigrants from Africa, Asia and, probably, South America, to such an extent that the Europe of tomorrow will be unrecognizable to anyone of Europe today. What these immigrants will want to do is anyones' guess.

Hutton, I believe, has some important position at Cambridge University, the justification for which truly escapes me. This man comes across as an arrogant, socialist idiot and I despair for his students.Why is he so feted by the BBC, appearing regularly on a variety of serious political and discussion programmes ? Could it be that the socialist bosses at the Beeb find his views attractive ? Surely not, but then where are the right wing economists on the same programmes ?