Currencies and Countries
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Looking at the UK, reunified Germany and the European Union, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister John Redwood MP asks how successful a currency union can be without political union behind it. After the travails of the eurozone in the wake of Irish, Portuguese, Spanish and - above all - Greek woes, John Redwood argues that the pressure is growing on the countries which use the euro to move closer politically. But not everyone in those countries agrees, as he discovers. Meanwhile, in the UK, leading Scottish Nationalists continue to make the argument for Scotland to become independent while retaining the pound. But how sustainable is this position? And what are the lessons of the decision by the German government to bring together the old East and West using a currency union that valued both countries' currencies at the same rate despite a huge gap in the productivity between the two?
Producer: Simon Coates.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading analysis. We have a new presenter this week, the Conservative MP and former Cabinet Minister John Redwood. |
| 0:07.0 | He argues that every currency union, which is when several countries share the same money, |
| 0:12.0 | requires a political union behind it. |
| 0:15.3 | In this program I want to explain why I believe a successful currency union usually requires |
| 0:21.2 | a political union to support it. |
| 0:23.0 | For me and my fellow Eurosceptics, the euro is an orphan currency. |
| 0:28.0 | It has no state to pay the bills and back it up. |
| 0:31.0 | I also believe the United Kingdom shows how a single currency needs |
| 0:36.1 | a single state. |
| 0:39.3 | It means future, I think. It means having money and can buy everything I want and not being |
| 0:47.2 | second-class people. We wore jeans for 40 years and now in such a little time we are one Germany and it's wonderful. |
| 0:57.0 | Over the last 25 years Germany too has shown why a currency union needs a strong political union behind it to succeed. |
| 1:05.7 | With the future of the euro, the European Union and even the United Kingdom all live issues, |
| 1:11.6 | this is a particularly good time to have this debate and I'm going to |
| 1:14.8 | start here at home. |
| 1:16.7 | The reasons why you need a political union to back a currency union were used as one of the main planks in the successful campaign last year for Scotland to remain in the UK. |
| 1:34.0 | Scottish Nationalist argued that they could keep the pound |
| 1:37.0 | whilst establishing a separate self-governing country. |
| 1:40.0 | The parties of the Union united to deny this. I suspect the threat of losing the |
| 1:46.6 | pound was the main issue which persuaded enough voters to back continuing |
| 1:51.6 | political union. |
| 1:53.0 | Any eight-year-old can tell you the flag of the country, the capital of a country and its currency. |
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