Saving the Euro, suggest ministers, will restore economic growth to Britain. It is, they imply, the most important thing we must do to ensure our own recovery.

Perhaps if the single currency was such a panacea for growth, we'd have seen a little more of it in stagnant Euroland this past ten years?

Maintaining the Euro at any price won't bring prosperity to either Britain or Euroland. The Euro is a recessionary mechanism. A monetary monster that condemns millions of Europeans to a life of falling living standards and rising debt.

By putting a Euro rescue deal ahead of the need to repatriate powers in this week's round of EU horse-trading, ministers are actually making it less likely that Britain will be able to apply the kind of supply-side reforms necessary to make ourselves competitive again.

Last month, the head of the Euro bailout fund flew to China to ask a country with an annual per capita GDP of $5,000 to rescue a continent with an annual per capita GDP of $30,000. Spot the flaw?

Europe is grossly uncompetitive - and losing global market share rapidly.

At the start of the millennium, the Lisbon Agenda was launched to try to make Europe "the most dynamic part of the global economy by 2010." It has failed comprehensively.

Rather than spend another decade or two trying to get Brussels technocrats to see what needs to change, we need to reclaim control so that at least we might make ourselves able to compete globally. Britain's Whitehall weenies don't even seem to recognize this, let alone have a negotiating strategy to make it happen.

Stability, they grandly tell us, is what the troubled Eurozone needs. I fear it might turn out to be the stability of a corpse.