British Opponents of the Euro Step Up Their Crusade

The common notion of “Euroskeptics” in Britain is that they are old, white and male.

That’s why Carishma Gillani, a 22-year-old Asian Briton studying at Oxford University, set up the Campaign Against a Federal Europe.

“I wanted to show a much more positive and internationalist view of Euroskepticism,” she said.

Her group’s purpose is “warning of the dangers of the European Union and what it would mean in terms of sovereignty, possibly of national identity, and certainly for the economy,” Gillani said.

From students like Gillani to retirees in their fourth decade of fighting European political integration to multimillionaires opposed to changing the monetary system, Britain’s anti-Europe campaigners are doing business as never before.

Their goal is to prevent Britain from ever using the euro, the common currency launched Jan. 1 by 11 European Union countries, including Germany, France and Italy.

Britain was one of three EU states that refused to adopt the currency in the first wave. Though Prime Minister Tony Blair supports eventually joining, he promises Britons a referendum on the issue.

British euro supporters believe the country needs to be part of the EU, which represents 20% of the world’s economic output and 18% of world trade. And full membership in the EU means joining its currency, they say.

Opponents of the single currency --represented by more than 50 groups and counting--are working feverishly to block that prospect.

Some want Britain to pull out of the EU entirely, saying it is growing into an undemocratic and unaccountable federal state. Some want membership in a restructured EU, but say adopting the euro would mean taking part in a “dangerous economic experiment.”

“It was a bit of a struggle in the lean years,” said Robin Williams, 70, who started campaigning against European integration more than 30 years ago.

Williams unsuccessfully fought for a “no” vote in a 1975 referendum on membership in the EU’s forerunner, the European Economic Community, which Britain had joined two years earlier.

Now the retired banker works from home as the unpaid secretary for the Campaign for an Independent Britain, a group with 3,000 dues-paying members.

The Democracy Movement, founded last year by multimillionaire Paul Sykes, is one of the new generation of anti-EU groups.

It has a snazzy Internet site, boasts a burgeoning membership of 30,000 and organizes town hall meetings.

In Richmond, a wealthy London suburb, speaker Bill Jamieson recently drew enthusiastic cries of “Hear, hear!” from the 200 people packed into a school gym when he called creeping EU federalism a threat to British democracy and bad for its economy.

EU regulations, he complained, amount to restrictions that “no political party in this country would dare to put before you at an election.”

After the EU launched a heroic cartoon character called “Captain Euro” to promote its common currency, the Democracy Movement produced a counter comic strip. It features a euro-baddie called “Captain Bureau,” an aging bureaucrat whose attempts to persuade children to love the euro are squashed by “Skeptic Spice,” modeled on the Spice Girls pop group.

Even if the Democracy Movement has the humor, it won’t win the argument, predicts Bob Worcester, director of the respected MORI opinion pollsters.

Britain’s entry into the euro is “a done deal,” Worcester said, and the Euroskeptic campaign is “the death throes of a dinosaur.”

Polls may say most Britons don’t like the euro, but Worcester predicts they’ll be using it within the decade. “What the British public are saying is that ‘we might not like it, but it is inevitable,’ ” he said.

Some people speculate that the sheer number of Euroskeptic groups is clouding their message.

Mindful of that possibility, Conservative Party lawmaker Michael Spicer, who runs his own European Research Group think tank, brought together dozens of groups last year to agree on platforms. He also ordered research on the types of campaigns most likely to appeal to Britons.

Nick Herbert, chief executive of Business for Sterling, a key anti-euro group backed by businesses, says the best strategy is to make the prime minister too scared to put the issue to the people.

“The government will shy away from a referendum until they think they can win it,” he said. “We want to stop the referendum being held.”