For southern Europeans, leaving the euro now makes more sense

With its treatment of Cyprus, the EU has unwittingly made the cost of leaving the euro much less daunting

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UNTIL a few days ago, it looked as if the dust was settling on the Cyprus crisis. With €10 billion promised from the EU and IMF, and a further €7 billion to come from the uninsured depositors in the island's two largest banks, the hope was that yet another bailout had been put to bed.

But one of the lessons of the unending euro debacle is that once a country gets into trouble, whatever is done to get it out is never enough. Greece has been bailed out so many times even the experts have lost count. Ireland – supposedly the poster boy for EU imposed austerity – has just had to be given an extra seven years to pay its debts.

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was a government special adviser in the Employment Department and the Northern Ireland Office during the 1980s. In the 1990s he was chief leader writer of The Daily Telegraph, and has contributed to The Times, Independent and Spectator. He is currently the deputy chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading centre right think tank, and also a consultant director of Politeia. In 2009 he published The Power of Numbers, Why Europe Needs To Get Younger, a survey of global demographic trends.