Time for a currency exchange

as merely rejections of the EU constitution; they are also popular protests against the economic and monetary system imposed on Europe by the Maastricht treaty.

At the time the euro was launched, opposition on the left came from three distinct groups. The Keynesians said a one-size-fits-all economy would be bad for jobs and growth. The greens said vesting power in an unelected remote central bank would cause a crisis of political legitimacy. The Marxists said that the single currency was a Trojan horse for neoliberal economic policies. All three predictions have proved to be 100% accurate.

The euro has proved to be a job-destruction machine and the miserable levels of growth in Europe since its launch have bred political disaffection, some of it nasty and xenophobic. The answer to economic performance, we are told, is to make Europe more competitive, importing the job flexibility and deregulation that makes the US work. It isn't. The answer is to get shot of the euro.

This may sound extreme, but in other walks of life policy failures lead to action, not more of the same. When Coca-Cola came up with New Coke in the 1980s and the public hated it, the company went back to traditional coke. When it became obvious that tower blocks weren't working, we stopped building them.

Larry Elliott is economics editor of the Guardian