Unemployment in the Eurozone reaches a new high

Unemployment in the eurozone has reached record high of 12.2%, according to official figures released today, which you can see here.

An extra 95,000 people were out of work in April in the 17 countries that use the euro, taking the total to 19.38 million.

Both Greece and Spain have jobless rates above 25%.

Anyone in Britain who is cheering about the problems of the Eurozone is seriously out of touch with reality. It is a human tragedy for the people out of work, and for their families. And it is bad news for Britain, because it will have a negative effect on British exports to those countries and slow down the recovery of our own economy.

But, and I can say "we told you so" as someone who was involved from day one of the "Keep the Pound campaign" (I was constituency Conservative chairman in St Albans when William Hague parked his lorry in St Albans market place to kick off the campaign), thank God we won the battle to stop Britain joining the Euro.

Britain sells half our exports to the EU and half to the rest of the world. Both halves of our trade are vital to the British economy. If we were using the Euro instead of having our own currency, it couldn't adjust to whatever level best balances British trade with Europe against our trade with the rest of the world.

That's what went wrong on "Black Wednesday" - the exchange rate of the pound against the DM was actually perfectly reasonable in terms of the purchasing power of those two currencies. The problem was that having our currency pegged at that rate against the german currency put it completely out of line against the dollar.

The fact that much of Europe is in recession would be a problem whether we were in or out of the Euro, but it would almost certainly create the same problem we had on Black Wednesday, only much worse, if we did not have our own currency.

This is an opportunity and a challenge for Britain in our negotiations with the rest of Europe. We must be very careful not to appear to hold any guns to the heads of other european countries while they are trying to sort out the European debt crisis, and are quite rightly focussed on getting their economies out of recession.

Equally, the present difficulties demonstrate only too clearly that too many countries were allowed into the Euro, and if the Eurozone is enlarged further that could easily create extra difficulties both for the joining countries and for existing members. That gives us a very powerful argument against forcing every country joining the EU to also join the Euro - and strengthens Britain's hand in arguing for a more flexible Europe.