Britain’s Government has decided the time is not yet right to join the euro, while leaving the door open to membership in the near future

Britain’s Government has decided the time is not yet right to join the euro, while leaving the door open to membership in the near future, newspapers said confidently today after ministers met to thrash out the issue. Citing unnamed insiders as well as comments by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown — who will formally announce the decision next Monday — the papers said euro entry had been rejected on economic grounds at a lengthy meeting the previous afternoon. Pro-euro ministers, reckoned by some papers to be a majority in the Cabinet, had been unable to counter Brown’s arguments that five self-imposed economic tests on the benefits of euro entry have not been met, the reports said. However, in an apparent sop to Prime Minister Tony Blair, widely seen as far more pro-euro than his chancellor, the possibility had been left open for a referendum on the issue within the next few years, the reports added. The predictions hardly amount to a leap in the dark, given that pundits have said for many months that the generally euro-wary Brown had won a battle inside the Cabinet to delay entry. The Government’s hands have been largely tied anyway, given its promise to let a broadly euro-sceptic public decide the matter via a referendum before entry. The chancellor himself dropped what papers saw as a significant hint after yesterday’s gathering at Downing Street, where the decision was finally thrashed out. Blair, who is seen as having been forced to virtually cede control over the euro to his fiercely territorial chancellor, is said to have been pushing hard to leave open the possibility of a plebiscite before the next general election, due by mid-2007 at the latest.