MULTI-CURRENCY FUTURE FOR BRITAIN PREDICTS TOP THINK TANK REPORT
As the nation waits for the government's verdict on the euro's "five economic tests", a new report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) says Britain's future is a multiplicity of currencies circulating alongside each other at city, town and regional level. The report also argues that the euro has already arrived, sidestepping the government's decision making process.

Beyond Yes and No predicts that there will be a range of other kinds of money – with or without the euro – that are underpinning different aspects of the economy in every city and region.

The increasing circulation of the euro alongside the pound in Britain, already happening now with many major retailers like Marks & Spencer, Safeway and Dixons and utilities such as British Gas, BT and Anglia Water accepting it, is the clue to a future of multiple parallel currencies rather than one.

The report shows that:
Whatever is decided by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, euro notes and coins are already beginning to circulate in Britain.

This opens up the possibility of a new kind of euro debate in the UK: not yes or no, but how much and how fast – and whether euros could be accepted for taxes or fines.
This paves the way for a key safeguard if we were to abolish the pound – a network of interlocking complementary currencies, in regions, cities and communities, that can provide low-cost finance for SMEs and to underpin different aspects of our lives.

A euro-only future will be socially and economically damaging without a range of complementary local and regional currencies to balance the impact of a single interest rate across the euro-zone economies. These other currencies, says the report, are a pre-condition for the uptake of the euro. "There are already thousands of examples of regional or local currencies that are working beneficially around the world, and two thirds of Fortune 500 companies use similar complementary currencies like trade dollars through business barter exchanges," said NEF associate David Boyle, the report's author.

The report advocates a solution of complementary currencies - some of them geared to the needs of small business, and used to provide cheap loans to them, some of them geared to the needs of farmers – as an antidote to the effects of a single currency.

"These benefits will be urgently needed for the outlying places and sectors of the UK if we abolish the pound – and even if we don't, it would mean a fairer and more stable Britain," said David Boyle. "We are already effectively running a dual currency economy. Further encouraging the euro to circulate alongside the pound would open the way for an incremental euro, taking its place alongside the pound because people use it, not because it is foisted on them."

"But it would also open the way for a possible solution to the key economic problem about abolishing the pound – that one interest rate cannot possibly suit a whole continent, and the bigger the currency, the more dangerous its effects on poorer people, cities and regions, and the greater the resulting divide between poor and wealthy."