Time for Britain to adopt the euro

Once Britain has decided to stay in the EU, as I hope and believe we will, our next move should be to adopt the Euro.
   Before you start ranting, please tell me why not? In what way is the pound superior to the euro? All the abuse hurled at the currency by all of Britain's media, even including supposedly progressive organisations such as The Guardian, is plain wrong.
   Adopting the euro would have immediate and lasting benefits for British businesses and also for all individuals travelling to another eurozone country. Yes, you personally would save money by no longer having to pay commission or lose out from poor exchange rates when going to any of the 19 countries in the eurozone, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain and all of western Europe's principal nations.
    Wherever you go in that vast region of more than 330 million people, you will know immediately from the price of an item whether it is good value, without having to convert it back into pounds in your head.
   Two decades after the euro became a real currency, as opposed to a virtual one, noone can argue any longer that the euro will collapse because of a lack of political unity in Europe. It has remain remarkably strong against the dollar and the pound despite the absence of the political union that many analysts thought was necessary.
   The fact that no single political authority controls the European Central Bank may even have helped the euro. Yes, several countries within the euro zone have experienced economic difficulties, but the eurozone as a whole has remained economically strong throughout, possibly boosted by the fact that the euro area remains a group of nation states, hindering economic problems in an individual state from spreading to the wider euro area.
    In practical terms the euro has become the world's second reserve currency after the dollar. Investments and savings denominated in euros are as safe as those in any other currency.
    When Britain adopts the euro the government and the bank of England can stop worrying out the exchange rate and focus on Britain's underlying economic problems.
    The idea that a devaluation of the pound can be used as a spur to the economy has been comprehensively disproven by the lack of visible economic benefit from the sharp devaluation of sterling in 2016 after the Brexit vote.
     Such is the euro's success in non-bigoted continental Europe, that some countries - eg Kosovo and Macedonia - use the euro as their currency even though they are not in the EU, while some other EU regions - eg tourist areas in Turkey - treat the euro as an equally valid alternative currency to their own.
    Did Greece leave the euro when Germany was demanding an austerity packed in return for a rescue package? No it didn't - the citizens of Greece decided they preferred to keep the euro and remain in the EU, whatever Yannis Varoufakis might have proposed.
    Did Cyprus leave the euro when the Troika of the EU, European Central Bank and World Bank, were demanding a levy on bank accounts to restore the government's finances? No it didn't - Cyprus went ahead with the bail-in of large bank accounts.
    The government realised the opportunities were much greater if Cyprus kept the euro rather than bring back the Cyprus pound.
    Italy has recently been at loggerheads with the European Central Bank over plans to allow a wider budget deficit than EU rules mandate.
    Will Italy leave the euro? Why on earth should it? Italy has run a budget deficit of more than 100% of GDP for many years and sticking with the EU and the euro has shored up the economy after decades of regular devaluation of the lira until the Italian currency was a laughing stock.
    I could cite academic or financial sector research analysing the underlying strength of the euro, but why not just judge for yourself instead of letting other people tell you what to think.
  
Whenever you go in a shop or restaurant in France, Spain or any other of the 19 eurozone countries, see how the staff treat the euro. You will see that they don't think about it - the euro is just the currency they use on a daily basis, and that is obviously how it is going to stay.