London: It's not hard to find some smug smiles in Britain these days as the rest of Europe grapples with a debt crisis that has cast doubt on the future of the euro.
This island nation has fiercely resisted adoption of the single, regional currency and has clung to the pound as a symbol of tradition and independence.
Before a summit of Eur-opean Union leaders this week, his usual Scottish dourness barely succeeded in masking Prime Minister Gordon Brown's schadenfreude when he declared that the euro's problems were for euro-using nations such as France and Germany to solve, not British taxpayers.
But Britain is in no position to sit back and relax, much less crow, analysts say, not when its own economy is still in such shaky condition, its credit rating in danger of an embarrassing downgrade and its government sinking deeper into debt.
The global downturn has hit Britain particularly hard, in part because of London's status as an international financial centre.
In fact, as a percentage of gross domestic product, Britain's yawning deficit is close to that of Greece, whose 12.7 per cent shortfall triggered the current crisis for the euro.
Investor panic
Athens' deficit is more than four times the prescribed limit for countries in the so-called euro zone, and in consequence, investor panic over a possible Greek default has hammered the euro's value.
"From day one, I've been absolutely delighted we're not in the euro zone, and I hope we never are," Peter Bickley, an independent economic consultant, said.
"It has been quite handy that we could blow the deficit out when we needed to."
But the problem now "is not so much that they've blown it out over the last two years, which during the recession was not a bad thing to do," Bickley said.
"The problem was the inherited position after the previous decade of fiscal incontinence. We came into it with the public finances in a really weak state, and they've gotten a lot worse."
Just as Greece has unveiled an austerity plan to get its finances in order, Britain must soon bite the fiscal bullet as well.
Shaping up
Exactly what and how deeply to cut is already shaping up as the dominant issue in the national election that must be held by early June.
The opposition finance spokesman, George Osborne of the Conservative Party, caused a minor stir in December when he warned that Britain might be on the same path to misery as Greece.
Banking giant JP Morgan Chase added to the debate when it noted in a report that, by a number of measures, Britain's fiscal situation now "looks significantly worse than in the mid-1970s," when London was forced to seek a humiliating bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
But 2010 is not 1976, the report added, in alignment with many economists who say that, while in tough circumstances, a Greece-style crisis does not loom large on Britain's horizon.
Last to emerge
Britain's was the last of the major economies technically to emerge from recession, and that only barely: It grew by a tiny 0.1 per cent in the final quarter of last year, and economists fear it could just as easily start contracting again. Like many other countries, including the US, Britain went on a public spending spree to stimulate demand during the recession's darkest days, shelling out money on infrastructure projects and cash-for-clunkers-style rebates. And as elsewhere, that has compounded a government budget deficit that is now at a level not seen since the Second World War.
