Official denials about Euro are not very convincing.

It looks to me that the official denials by the British government about not
joining the Euro are not very convincing. It has been left to officials to poo-poo the idea of jettisoning sterling and joining the single currency. Lord Mandelson has said there are more pressing problems to sort out but the long-term objective is to join the Euro. That is not much of a denial.
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I remember when the single currency was set up there was talk of prices converging. However, the price of a coffee in a cafe is very different in Finland compared with Portugal. Also one attraction for the Club Med countries is that they would swap their weak currencies with a strong one. However, despite the D-Mark being fixed at a relatively high rate, the Club Med countries have been defenceless against German exporters. They have been unable to protect their domestic companies from competitors, which have cut costs and benefited from lower inflation.
It is in the nature of things that central banks are heavily criticised but the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank recently kept interest rates unnecessarily high when it could have supported the U.S Federal Reserve Bank when it was cutting.
This made the dollar weaker than it should have been.