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This is a truly fascinating debate. As I write, the 'yes' side of the argument is losing, yet has more than twice as many articles as the 'no' side. That tells me something. It tells me that those who believe that a single global currency could not work are so arrogantly set in their views that they feel there is nothing to say about the matter. What grieves me is that their side of the argument will almost certainly win!

Before I lay on my back with my legs in the air in total submission, however, let me recount my experiences of when the Euro was first introduced into most member countries of the European Union. The Italians mourned their lire and complained that the price of coffee was now artificially inflated. The French bemoaned the loss of their beloved franc and thought they had lost their unique French identity. The Greeks were, on the whole, quite glad as their Drachma had reached ridiculous proportions over the years due to inflation, so that their banknotes were in the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Drachmas.

The Irish heaved an Irish sigh, raised their collective glass of Guiness and got on with life.

The British? In the typical fashion of a tiny nation hauling itself up to look taller than its neighbours, decided they did not want to play ball at this time. They would keep the pound, thank you very much. Nothing quite so dramatic as a change in currency for the Brits. Good God, no! Johnny Foreigner can do whatever he likes, but Britain is for the British. The belief was - and remained for years - that the pound was far stronger than the Euro and was more closely linked to the US Dollar in terms of trading than it was to that new Monopoly Money now embraced by most of its close neighbours.

The Euro has been in being now for nearly seven years. It has gained in strength relative to both the pound and the dollar. It has made trading between France and Spain, Germany and Italy, Greece and Holland and any other combination you could care to mention far, far simpler. I can drive from my home in France into any of my neighbouring countries without the need to change the money in my wallet, without the need to perform complicated mathematics to decide if I am buying cheaply or not and without paying a huge amount of commission to my bank. I don't need to worry about the value of my currency compared with the value of my neighbours' currency because it is precisely the same.

Writing for Helium and various other US publishers, means that a proportion

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