As others see us 2

The WSJ speculates how much worse things would have been for the Euro zone if Britain had joined:

Fraught as things are now, imagine how much worse they are in some parallel universe where the UK adopted the euro. After all, even in this world it managed to get itself into arguably more trouble than any developed economy with interest rates a good deal higher than those it would have had from the European Central Bank.

Its orgy of public and private debt-fuelled madness would have been even worse inside the Euro zone than it was out, hard though that is to imagine. The UK’s public-sector net debt was £952.8 billion as of September 2010. Put that in euros, remember that it might well have been higher, and it makes Ireland, Spain and Greece look like well-governed paragons.

Hard not to conclude then that UK eurosceptics missed a trick. They should have been keen to join up. By now their bloated, flailing economy would probably have gone down, taking the whole project with it.